[Reader-list] Fwd: ragpicking or recycling: from squattercity

[Ravi Agarwal]

Over 100,000 people connected with waste picking, collecting and recycling
over 15% of the cities 7000 mt of waste dialy, are 'illegal','  have no
recognition (except through NGO efforts) , and are now being threatened of
their livlihoods through large scale corporatisation of waste collection and
waste treatment with projects worth hundreds of crores of rupees. What was
an individual model of  sustainance is now becoming a centralised model of a
'waste business' on the lines of  cities in Europe and the US.

How do we intgegrate the question of ecology, environment and sustainability
in the question of people's lives. their land and the flux of a fast
changing city when we are confronted with  'successful' corporate models of
massive capital and powerful ownerships? Where is the space to counter such
dominences of such scale, and what are the terms of engagement, when social
structures and ecological questions are intermeshed? I think there is no
parallel for this, leaving our activists lost and others too overwhemled to
propose a way ahead.

ravi agarwal

On 9/11/07, Rob van Kranenburg <kranenbu at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>
> How's this for an interesting fact: "More than 95 percent of New
> Delhi has no formal system of house-to-house garbage collection, so
> it falls to the city's ragpickers, one of India's poorest and most
> marginalized groups, to provide this basic service for fellow citizens."
>
> That the situation in India's capital city, according to dispatch
> from the International Herald Tribune.
>
> http://squattercity.blogspot.com/2007/09/ragpicking-or-recycling.html
> http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/02/asia/rag.php
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