Understanding and Addressing Livelihood Problem of Rag-Pickers in Surat City

Rag pickers are considered as extremely unskilled poor coming from the lowest background in social hierarchy and live either on railway platforms, footpaths, or in unhygienic shanties of disease-infested slums. The present paper has attempted to explore the various problems facing by the rag pickers. This paper is based on the empirical analysis of the study named socio-economic conditions of rag pickers in Surat city. The study was based on 152 rag pickers selected through snowball and purposive sampling from the actual operational spots like landfill site, garbage transfer station or road side while they are collecting the waste. In order to give better representation of different areas/locations, the author has selected some slum pockets also. The data analysis presented in this paper is based on the primary data collected through an interview schedule. The author also attempted to capture the insights of the situation through some case studies of child rag pickers. The study shows that 80 percent of the rag pickers are illiterate and choose this work because they have no other livelihood option to survive. The study pointed out health risk and social security is a major problem to the rag pickers. Almost 80% of the rag pickers reported that they were either sick or injured in the last one month prior to our field visit. The study revealed that rag pickers are totally dependent on the small waste dealer for their daily income. The study concludes that there is a decreasing pattern of income among the rag pickers after the implementation of door to door (d2d) garbage collection program. The finding of the study shows that almost 70% of the rag pickers have lost nearly 50% of their income after the implementation of d2d program. Almost all have reported that though “more hours are spent in the collection of waste, they earned less”. During our focus group discussion with rag-pickers’ families most of them reported that they spent whole day without taking meal at least once in a week prior to our field visit. The state government wants to drastically cut the number of BPL cards to give the impression that the hunger situation is improving but in the study it was found that almost 70% respondents reported that they sleep in the night without taking food at least once in a week.