See Part 1 of Sudharak Olwes photo essay from Mumbai.
There are 30,000 conservancy workers employed by the Greater Bombay Municipal Corporation. These workers pick up our garbage, sweep our streets, clean our gutters, load and unload the garbage trucks and work on dumping grounds.
Not a pretty picture is a photo study of their living hell. It seeks to understand how and why an entire workforce gets so shrouded in hopelessness and despair that the workers come to despise not only their work but themselves as well.
There are five dumping grounds on the eastern and western edges of the city. The stench is unbearable. The garbage that the workers rake out includes animal carcasses, food remains, steel wires, hospital waste, jagged pieces of wood, pipes, stones, broken glass, blades...
The dumping grounds are now filled to capacity. In fact, they are over filled. This makes the workers job even more physically demanding. And even more hazardous.
Rubbish is taken to the dumping grounds by truck
A sweeper sorting waste
Garbage spilling out of a truck
Mumbais waste ground
Vidhyabai has been recently widowed. She is the mother of a one-year-old daughter. She now has a kholi (a room) and her husbands job. Her single status makes her an easy target for sexual harrassment. That is why she makes it a point of wearing the bindi and the manga/sutra when she goes to work. Alcohol does the rest.
An alcoholic sweeper outside his house.
Alcohol closes our thinking media. We forget everything and are ready for anything. Nothing hurts us anymore...
Alcohol wastes away their bodies, ruins their health and brings death early.
Bhimabhai lost her first son, aged 15, when the balcony of her chawl collapsed. Soon after that, she lost her second son. Then her husband died of TB.
Inside a kholi
A street cleaners family
An abused family - by the time the worker reaches home, alcohol has turned him into a tormentor, a crazed demon who abuses and beats his wife and children.
One of the perks of the job is getting a kholi. These two families - the one sitting and the other standing - live in the same 10 foot by 12 foot room. This is not uncommon. In many kholis a line drawn on the ground demarcates each familys territory.
These two families have not spoken to each other in eight years. The fight is about who the rightful owner of the kholi is - the widow or the brother.
Ramesh Haralkar with children of conservancy workers. Haralkar worked for 8 years as a street cleaner. "My struggle is to try and motivate children not to become like their parents. They have to educate themselves if they want to climb out of hell."
Haralkar managed to get access to two rooms in a BMC school in Bombay where children can go to study seven days a the week. Three hundred children come to the evening classes. A tiny ray of hope.
All photographs © Sudharak Olwe 2003. Not to be used without written permission.
