A day in the life of an Indian child sweeper

GAUHATI, India (AP) – As soon as school is finished, 10-year-old Imradul Ali rushes home to take off his uniform so he can start his job as a scavenger in remote northeast India.

Armed with a burlap bag, he goes to a dump in the slums of Gauhati, the capital of the state of Assam. Here he chases through heaps of other people’s garbage, looking for plastic bottles, glass, or something salvageable that he can recycle or sell. Cows graze around him on the waste heaps along the site.

Ali comes from a family of scavengers, or ‘rag pickers’ – his father, mother and older brother all earn their living from it. He started doing it over a year ago to help his family make more money.

The family was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic last year as they couldn’t go to the dump to look for trash to sell things. They struggled during months of imprisonment in India but were able to obtain food with the help of aid organizations.

Ali says he doesn’t want to spend his entire life on this, but he doesn’t know what the future holds. “I want to keep going to school and I want to be a rich man,” he said.

He earns up to 100 rupees ($ 1.30) a day, while the rest of his family earns about 250 rupees ($ 3.30) each.

“It’s very difficult to run a family picking rags,” said Anuwara Begum, Ali’s mother.

Cleaning up is dirty and dangerous work. While there is no exact count, aid agencies say about 4 million people in India work as scavengers. In fact, it is the primary recycling system in the country, but the work is not environmentally friendly. Those who do it have few rights and are exposed to deadly toxins every day.

At the last census in India in 2011, the total number of child laborers between the ages of 5 and 14, including scavengers, reached about 10 million.

Thadeus Kujur, who leads the charity group Snehalaya, says it’s always sad to see kids collecting leftovers instead of going to school. His group runs five childcare facilities, which take care of 185 boys and girls, and has helped 20,000 children in seven years. “We run motivational programs for poor parents to realize the value of education before taking their children to school,” he said.

According to a new analysis by the World Bank Group and the UN Children’s Fund, an estimated one in six children, or 356 million worldwide, lived in extreme poverty before the pandemic started – and the number is expected to worsen significantly.

Ali’s father wants his son to keep going to school, hoping that he will run his own shop or get a coveted government job when he grows up, putting an end to their suffering.

As for Ali, he wants to drive a car and wants to own one in the future. “I want good food and clothes,” he said.