For most people in Mumbai, the dumping ground at Deonar remains an invisible place, something like a “garbage cloud”, where their waste can be parked out of sight. Nothing in their imagination can prepare them for this unseen land. A mountain of garbage, conservatively estimated to be seven to nine storeys high. A stench that pervades your nostrils, gets into your clothes, under your skin. The dumping ground lies ignored until a blaze there sends smoke around the city, bringing into focus the question of garbage disposal.
Some of us have the privilege of never seeing this place in Deonar to which one-third of our city’s waste travels. But others are not that lucky. For the citizens who live in its shadow, the stench and the health hazards are an everyday reality. They don’t have the privilege of the middle classes who forget about this other city and go about the business of enjoying the global city.
Private and public spaces
The global city, despite its lack of truly public spaces, seems to be exploding with possibilities. As we write, there are some excellent exhibitions going on in downtown Mumbai on architecture, medicine and healing, and violence. Ballard Pier, where deserted roads transform into cricket pitches on holidays, hosts a ticketed festival of sorts every weekend with music, food, cultural performances and a flea market. The annual Kala Ghoda Festival in Fort is around the corner too.
But while these spaces are public in a narrow sense of the word, they are being privatised. There is a strong contrast between these and the other city with its rich and intense community celebrations – whether driven by piety or earthly concerns – and where the boundaries between private and public are blurred. In Mumbai’s khau gullies, particularly around the suburban railway stations, one can safely stop to eat, even late, something hot, tasty and affordable. Single-screen theatres and small video parlours are still affordable, so that people go there not only to watch films but also to unwind and sleep.
While this other city is still accessible to the middle classes, should we so desire, the opposite is rarely true. We use high walls, excessive surveillance, physical segregation and violence to keep people from transgressing boundaries beyond which they are contained indefinitely. Policed by the state, the elite and even the civil society, the attempt seems to be to create a self-contained world-class or smart city insulated from the margins and the marginalised.
At a meeting recently convened by the residents of middle- and upper-middle-class housing societies in Deonar to think of strategies to deal with the crisis precipitated by the blaze at the dumping ground, we encountered a variety of views.
While some asked for the contractor to be hung upside down atop the dumping ground, some others suggested that residents should stop paying taxes until the problem is resolved or to protest by blocking the Mumbai-Panvel highway. Legal recourse to bring those guilty of negligence or mischief was also deliberated upon. Amidst these submissions, there were voices of reason which acknowledged that the slums around the dumping ground are not a part of the problem. The residents of these slums, in fact, toil in extremely dangerous conditions to do the work that the privileged residents should be doing in the first place – segregation and recycling at home, neighbourhood and ward level. Someone also suggested that the protests to highlight the problem should be broad-based, mobilising not just those who live in high-rises but also the most vulnerable residing on the edges of the dumping ground.
At that meeting, the smoke from the dumping ground – by neither recognising nor respecting class boundaries – had brought into dialogue the two cities.
Redefining the city
But the conversation cannot end here. Up on the dumping ground, the situation is grim. Both formal and informal workers involved in waste management are doing precarious work. An overwhelming majority, comprising women and children, have neither job security nor access to basic safety measures. Not very long ago, they had protested outside the office of the municipal commissioner, offering him footwear found in the city’s dustbins, since the municipality did not think of providing them with shoes. Joote do ya joote lo, went the slogan. Injuries and fatalities in the line of work are common, particularly from the carelessly disposed medical waste. Data accessed by Safai Kamgar Vikas Sangh, a body representing sanitation workers, shows that 2,309 conservancy workers engaged with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation died between 1996 and 2006, which on average translates to 20 casualties a month. The count is estimated to be much higher since these figures do not account for contract workers engaged by the BMC in similar profiles.
The smoke engulfing the city must be a sharp reminder that any dialogue that does not acknowledge workers’ struggles and fundamental human rights, demands for fair income, workplace safety and security, opportunities for personal development and social integration, freedom to organise – all extremely basic conditions laid under the widely accepted rubric of Decent Work – is devoid of meaning. Many of us among the middle classes have a five-day work week, eight-hour work day, paid leave, social security and a range of privileges today because frontline workers fought for them. These battles were fought not for one group or trade but as universal rights.
The workers will, without doubt, win these battles on their own steam, as they have done in the past. They will continue to make Mumbai better whether we stand with them or not. It is us, the middle class lovers of this city teeming with exhibitions and cultural festivals, who are dragging it down with mounts of garbage that spew smoke. Will the smoke in our lungs compel us to redefine the city?