On the 26th and 27th of October 2007 I visited Kanchipuram for the second time. As before, Raj's guiding and planning was excelent. Raj is the project manager of all of SAM's work in Kanchipuram town. He is building his family a house in a nice quarter of the town. He has a wife who works in a kinder garden and two daughters. Raj's mission in life is to eradicate child labor and abolish all the violence of children like child marraige and female infanticides. When Raj got married he did what most people in Tamil Nadu find unthinkable, he didn't ask for any dowry from his parents in law! Dowry problems like lifelong debts of brides parents, violence and death of young wifes are huge problems in India. With growing economy and stronger longings of the middle class, the problem is getting worse.
At the end of this second visit, Raj took me to visit these two Irular men. They are relatives and one of them has a wife and two children. They all live together in this tent close to Raj's new house. The family's work is to pick rags and all kinds of junk and sort them for recycling. They get paid per kilo when they hand it in. You can see how they have spread the garbage around for drying and sorting.
Most villages and towns don't have any garbage schemes. So behind ones house or a no mans land close to ones home is where people dump their garbage. Many poor people make their living from collecting the recyclable things. In the cities of India there are many quarters where inhabitants all live in tents like this. In Mumbay (former Bombay) as much as half of inhabitants live in slums. In the south, in Bangalore and Chennai (former Madras) the situation is better.
It seemed to me ... all the effort made to make positive social, economical and environmental changes in India ... are done by NGO's. And where do the NGO's get their money to work? From the western countries mostly so keep it up!
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The tent is horrifying.
Two questions: What is 'SAM'and 'NGO'? And on picking garbage for recyling - where do they hand it in? Is there a government-run recycling program, or is it run by independent companies?
SAM is short for Social Action Movement, the Human rights organization I was working with in Tamil Nadu. Raj, the man who is also in the clip works there. NGO is short for Non Governmental Organisation. About the recycling programs, I seem to remember that I asked the same question out there ... hmm, well I'm not sure but many things there are government run.
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