Letter to the editor highlighting the condition of rag pickers in india
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The Rag pickers
The most vulnerable among street children are those who are engaged in rag picking work, which are called as such though they pick up anything but rags. They collect scraps from streets, market places, garbage bins, and waste dumps, picking up material such as paper, cardboard, plastic, iron scrap, tin containers, and broken glass, in fact anything thrown away by households, shops, workshops, or other establishments that can be sold to dealer who buy these for the recycling industry. Children, both boys and girls, begin their rounds early in the morning slinging huge sacks on their slender shoulders as they scrounge places for scrap, traveling 8 or 10 kilometers, even more, in a day. Very young children usually move in groups, as also the girls who are sometimes accompanied by an adult female who, too, is a scrap picker .
Some of the child rag pickers are very young, hardly 6 years of age, moving along with older children and learning to identify scrap items to be collected. The children come from a very poor socio economic background. Not all have families. Some have come to the city alone and sleep on pavements or shacks along with other street children, while many others have rather weak links with their families and are, by and large, on their own. Rag picking is an extremely hazardous occupation. The children constantly expose themselves to the danger of accidents, injuries, and disease through contacts with sharp material and poisonous substances as they scrounge with bare hands and sometimes even bare feet. It is not only their working environment that is very unhygienic and disease prone; their living environment is equally bad. Rag picker children, thus, rank among the most vulnerable category of working children. A matter of great concern is that with urbanization, and the increased volume of throw-away packing and waste material, the number of such children is growing. In Delhi thousands of street children are engaged in rag picking, especially it is one of the area where large number of girls are found to be working (as per the information given by NGOs working with street children) and apart from being exposed to several types of health hazards they are also exposed to risk of sexual harassment and physical exploitation by the people of outside world. Because of which their moral and psychological development is at stake.
The present study sought to reveal the situation pertaining to the magnitude and the problems of girls engaged in rag picking is very much wanting. The present study aims to explore and analyze the situation and problem of girl rag pickers with the aim of understand the socio-economic background of girls engaged in rag picking, the factors forcing them to get into this work, the implications arising out of this work on the development of these girls and suggest measures to improve the conditions of the girls engaged in rag picking work.
For the present study, the term rag picker girl means, a girl between 10 to18 years who is engaged in collection of rags and other waste materials since last 6 months from the date of data collection. Children below 10 years were not considered mature enough to provide information in the light of the objectives of the present study; hence they were not included in the sample