PART 1

This passage is about scavenging.

“Scavenging” is searching through garbage for useful items. New Delhi, the capital city of India, is one of many places around the world where large numbers of people directly rely on this activity for their survival. There are over 1.5 million trash pickers in India, and about 350,000 of them reside in New Delhi. In the city’s 30-year-old Ghazipur landfill, countless children and adults scavenge through the 100-foot-high trash pile in order to find anything that can be sold, such as plastic bags, metal, glass bottles and even human hair, which is used for wigs. Families working in the landfill typically earn less than $2 a day.

“Rag pickers”, as they sometimes call themselves, have to be on the lookout for bulldozers, the drivers of which can’t usually spot them in the multi-colored heaps of garbage. Many of the scavengers live in makeshift homes around the trash dump, with little or no access to proper food, clean water or health care. As a result of the lack of sanitation, gastrointestinal illness is very common. Furthermore, those who buy food from nearby producers frequently end up consuming products, such as milk and meat, which have been contaminated with lead and dioxins. Unsurprisingly, rates of asthma, birth defects and cancer are high in the area.

The trash pickers of the Ghazipur landfill say that the money they make helps them to feed their families and, in some cases, even provide their children with some education. The relatively new Western-style consumerism of India’s expanding middle class has resulted in a huge increase in the amount of garbage produced. New Delhi, for example, produces approximately 9,200 tons of trash per day now, which is about 50% more than it produced about 5 years ago. That amount is expected to double within a decade.