Urbanization
Garbage City
Have you ever wondered what happens to the garbage after you leave it on the curb?
In developing countries, trash from the cities are commonly picked through by the poor and unwanted members of society. These trash pickers go by many names: the Zabaleen in Egypt, pepenadores in Mexico, and ragpickers in India.
These people rely on trash for their livelihoods. They spend hours sorting through these huge piles of rancid waste by hand. For them, almost everything is reusable. Organic materials are used to feed their livestock; recyclable materials are washed and resold. Indian ragpickers make only 100-150 rupees ($2.50-$3.75) for eight hours of sifting.
These overlooked members of society perform an important service for the rest of the population. In Delhi, ragpickers "represent almost 1% of Delhi's total population and handle about 20% of the city's enormous daily waste," according to Paul Colombini, who created a website on which Delhi recyclers can tell their own stories. It is estimated that these ragpickers save the city 600,000 rupees a day in trash disposal costs.
Though this work is dirty and smelly, they take pride knowing the invaluable service they perform.
We don't like attention. Rubbish is never attractive and we're quite happy carrying on quietly ... but our work supports a whole industry that's virtually invisible to most people.
With the Slums in Tow
It must be frustrating to live in a major city but face daily power outages, water shortages and the stench of manure from urban-dwelling farm animals. Any reprise from this life would be welcome.
In India, gated communities are fast becoming popular for the people that can afford them. But the protected oasis provided by many of these communities is a quick fix to India's infrastructure problems, rather than a long-term solution.
In recent years India has witnessed a boom in the upper-middle class, much of it due to outsourced jobs from the U.S. and Europe. This population can afford some of the luxuries not available to all Indians, such as reliably running water and electricity, clean streets, even 24-hour security.
They also demand special services, maids, chauffeurs and gardeners. So over time, manual laborers who populate neighborhoods these nouveau riche were trying to flee simply relocate to locations where jobs are available.
“Townships are just one example of how Indian city planners increasingly focus on the upper strata of society and ignore the vast majority of city dwellers,” believes Krishna Menon, director of the TVB School of Habitat Studies in New Dehli.
Menon also points out that gated communities gated reinforce India's traditional caste system, a system the country is trying to shed. A recent New York Times article on India's gated communities suggests that these enclosed home sites, "pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds.”
It's not that conditions for the poor are becoming worse. But the lack of infrastructure is becoming more apparent as gated communities face some of the same problems that Indian cities do. A story in Britain's Guardian newspaper says about Central Park, a new community outside of New Dehli,
The power fails, the air-conditioning switches off and the taps run dry. Unscrupulous developers fail to deliver, confident that they will never be prosecuted by India's slow-moving legal system.
Gated communities may provide families with more security, but they don't inoculate residents against the country's deeper structural problems. Since India is the world's largest democracy, where politicians as well as developers are responsive to the upper-middle-class residents, perhaps those residents should use their collective power to bring about changes that would benefit everyone.
Genuine Leather Made by...Children?
Move over Italy. Developing countries are the up-and-coming leaders of the leather market, boasting cheaper production costs and fewer environmental regulations.
There is a good chance that your soccer ball, leather belt or aviator jacket was tanned in one of Pakistan’s 2,500 leather factories in the industrial centers of Karachi, Kasur, and Sialkot. The factories mostly employ poor people from neighboring areas, especially young children who will work for cheap wages. In one town alone, Kasur, more than 700 children worked in leather-tanning factories, according to the International Labor Organization.
NPR's Marketplace recently profiled a 17-year-old Pakistani boy, Mohmen, who's worked in the tanning industry since he was 13.
Like so many of Pakistan’s child workers, Mohmen has sacrificed his childhood to support his family. He has toiled in a hazardous leather tanning factory for four years. Six days a week Mohmen moves animal skins from a cart to a conveyor belt.
His heavy workload is not the only thing in the factory that will begin to take a toll on Mohmen. A 1996 Swedish study found that leather tannery workers experience an increased risk of cancer due to their exposure to toxic chemicals.
Mohmen would like to leave and go home to his family but he knows that he cannot. “How can I go home if I have to keep paying somebody? I keep paying what my family owes.” He is just a kid, but he is in an adult world where there is no rest from poverty's harsh realities.
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