Picking up the pieces in Ahmedabad

“My name is Tulsibhai Naranbhai, but if you need to find me, you’ll have to say ‘call Bachchan’. That’s how everyone knows me,” says Tulsibhai, on why he is fondly called by the name of a film superstar.

The 60-year-old lives with his son Tanubhai on a footpath near Gulbai Tekra, an open settlement in Ahmedabad. His wife passed away soon after Tanubhai’s birth. “My grandmother brought me up. She is still alive and over a hundred years old,” Tanubhai, now in his thirties, tells us.

The father and son collect waste from nine in the morning till nine at night, and sell it to bhangarwalas (scrap dealers) in Memnagar — a taluka in the city where waste-pickers sell their collections by the kilogram.

On the day this reporter met them, they had collected about four kilos of plastic bottles and a kilo of cardboard, working since two in the afternoon. That earned them Rs. 110 from scrap dealers. “The summer was too hot this time,” says Tulsibhai, “we would fall sick. We used the cardboard we picked up to fan ourselves in the heat during the day.”

Covering roughly five kilometres between Vastrapur, Memnagar, and Naranpura every day, the father and son have been collecting and selling waste for over seven years. During the monsoon months when picking waste becomes even more difficult, the duo makes idols for the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi, which comes after the season.

“I used to have a job of making and selling things like chains, rings, and metal and pearl pieces. Since the owner left town, the shop was shut and I lost the job.” says Tulsibhai. “Earlier, I used to travel everywhere – Gokul, Mathura, Dwarka to deliver these goods. Now this [waste-picking] is the work I have to do,” he says.

As does 75-year-old Kamuben Vaghela who lives in Naranpura. Once a domestic worker, she too has turned to waste-picking to manage her five grandchildren that she is bringing up on her own – her son and daughter-in-law passed away in 2023.

The grandmother works from morning to evening, returning home briefly in the afternoon to feed the young children, including two granddaughters who are visually impaired. Occasionally she does additional cleaning work to earn a few extra rupees.

None of the children go to school. “Who will drop and pick them up?” she asks. “The municipality’s school is far away and they can’t go on their own.”

Waste pickers are vulnerable to health hazards including increased chances of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and dermatological diseases to higher risks of infected cuts and animal bites. India has an estimated four million workers engaged in the waste management sector, according to this 2023 study.

Forty-year-old Reetarben also collects waste in the city. She says, “On some days, I can’t even take a bath. You tell me – can a person do such work and go to sleep without a bath? On those days, I can’t even sleep. I feel the dirt on my body.”

She lives on a footpath in Naranpura. The public bathroom she sometimes uses to take a bath and wash her clothes costs Rs. 10 per use.

“I can barely make enough to have food.” Unwrapping a packet of chips tied into her saree, she says, “I haven’t eaten a meal in three days. My sahib found out, so he bought me this packet of chips.”

She points to multiple bruises on her arms, “Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that my husband beats me. But they can’t do anything. He gets drunk and beats me, hits me with vessels.”

“She earns the money but her husband spends it on alcohol. Is that fair?” says Shardaben, who is Reetarben’s 70-year-old neighbour and another waste-picker.

“I am looking for any other work I can do. If I find something good enough, I can get away from my husband. I have all of Ahmedabad, why shouldn’t I?” says Reetarben.

“But we have to do this work,” Shardaben says, “we are harijan, this is the work we do.”