“Your Waste is Someone’s means of living”
Every nook and any corner of the city, one can find rag pickers accumulating trash from different parts of our society. The quantum of garbage created has gone up and much littler urban communities are delivering more trash than some time recently. The landfills are overburdened and appropriate isolation of waste is a crying need.
Keeping in mind the issue keeps on heaping on unabated, the general population conveying this weight, the rag pickers whose administrations every one of us depend on for keeping our environment clean, keep on languishing unacknowledged by our government.
We all have a dignified job nine to five, but about them; they do not have such a respected job. A rag picker is neither a thief nor a beggar but treated badly our Indian society as the low standard people. Despite performing social service at great risk to their health, for bringing a piece of bread to eat, for a little money for their family, their contribution to “SWACHH BHARAT” is undermined. Every day they throw away nonchalantly material which includes plastic, clothes, metal pieces, waste boxes and many other things.
India has an estimate of 17 million child workers aged 5-14 in child labor activities like rag picking. Some shocking facts of India are:
- Numerous of rag pickers begin at 4-5 years. In a late study, in Patna and Raipur 20% of aggregate these were between of 5-14 years, and 40% of the aggregate dump site waste pickers were youngsters. New Delhi and Mumbai have around 300,000 cloth pickers and around 120,000 are less than 14 years old.
- Kids as youthful as 5 works from morning to night to gather enough waste for maintaining themselves.
- Numerous of rag pickers originate from country territories into colossal urban communities for better living and can't discover opportunities and wind up gathering garbage.
- Many rag pickers live on the street, are homeless and don’t even get the benefits of education or healthcare.
- Rag pickers generally work unshod in the Indian warmth, get presented to chemicals and perilous substances and frequently experience the ill effects of life undermining sicknesses thus.
When interviewed with local rag pickers, they stated that the landfills are loaded with a wide range of materials, paper, plastic, garments, metal and the waste heaps are practically as high as the tallest structures encompassing the region. They collect the waste and earn their bread for the day. Some said that we don’t earn enough to resolve our family problems like education to our children, food, shelter, clothes. So, here what they do, they drink a lot as they think it will reduce their tensions. Let us suppose if men rag pickers earn 50 per day, this is not enough for the whole family to accomplish all the needs. They spend the entire amount in drinking alcohol. They work a minimum of 10-12 hours every day and are paid  meagerly, their monthly income never crossing  3000-3500 rupees.
As, people, we have to ensure that we minimize our waste and utilize shading coded waste receptacles – green for biodegradable, white for recyclable squanders and dark for different squanders. We ought to forbid littering in the city. We ought to regard everybody in our group and ought to say a firm no to separation. Arranging waste is not an inefficient business. There are such a large number of issues that convey multifaceted nature that it is hard to discover where to begin. India needs a legitimate system for waste administration, the laws relating to kid work should be enforced– every one of these exercises are unlawful, and generally the scrap merchants who purchase from these children and families should be considered responsible even rebuffed, in the event that we can go that far! It is the obligation of everybody in the quality chain. We have to ask our organizations what their own reusing techniques and arrangements are. Why can't customers give back the ragged out items to organizations and have them reuse as opposed to tossing stuff outside to decay and for the rag pickers to battle with? Each little stride here is a stage forward.
