HOW SLAG-PICKERS EKE OUT A LIVING

Osama Manzar
There is nothing base about the means of earning a livelihood. Everyone earns differently. Some earns their livelihood through serving the nation. Some earn it through business. But rarest of the sources of earning a livelihood is through heap of dust. But for the 4000 strong dumpmen, mass of dump scattered around half-a-kilometer stretch behind foundary forge plant in Heavy Engineering Corporation has been the only source of substances for them for the last 28 years.
For these 4000 dumpmen the dump behind the FFP is not only a source of survival but also their inheritance and future. The dump which consists of rejected coal, sand and iron chips provide at least Rs. 18 lakh per month to these slagpickers.
They are not workers, they are not bounded labourers, they are simply slagpickers. They do not have any regret if a child works there, as one dumpman, Seraj puts it, “Our life started in his dump and it will end in this dump.
Their life revolvers around this dump place where the work starts at 10.30 am and ends at 6 pm. Exactly at 10.30 am when HEC siren sounds the dumpmen start their job for the next eight hours. For the dumpmen, the job is not as casual as dustmen, they have their selfmade rules which they follow very strictly.
The whole dumpmen fraternity works as a member of “Swatantra Dumping Majdoor Vistapit” which is headed by Mr. Shiv Charan Ram. The work is mainly divided into three categories; sand dumpmen, coal dumpmen and the chips dumpen. The persons under each group can pick only sand, coal and chips respectively. Such is the well defined rules among the dumpmen that if one dumpan an attends one truck of dump, he can’t attend the next truck again.
This rule suggests that every dumpman should be given equal chance. They work systematically, cohesively and with unity.
About 4000 dumpmen who live in as many as 20 mohallas and tolas have neither any school nor any learned person in their midst to guide them. One old dumpmen Mr. Bakreed Khan very rightly complains. “The government has provided us nothing. Our children are uneducated”.
We have no water supply, not even, a shed at the dump site. So many politicians and pressmen visited them regularly including Mr. Subodh Kant Sahay, MP, but their condition is a pathetic as it has ever been, complained the aggrieved dumpman.
For the dumpmen the site is the mountain of Gold, where the only voice that can be heard is khurr... khurr... [The noises of khurpi used to pick the coal sand & chimps].