Ecowise

Welcome to another Trash Talking Friday, the only trash talk that day dreams all day and still gets all its shit done! Each week, I send you Ideas to ponder about. Ideas that have the potential to change your life, and hopefully help you become a better human being by understanding yourself.

This week’s article is part one of a series of three articles covering the involvement of the mafia in the waste management business. This week I cover 1) Unorganised rag pickers syndicate 2) Kabadi Syndicate 3) I touch on this briefly with details disclosed in next weeks article 

 Let’s get into it!

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be gangster. That’s the beginning of the movie “Goodfellas” and the character narrating the dialog in first person is Henry Hill, a real-life gangster turned informant on whom the film is based. But I am no gangster, and this is no movie; this is India’s waste management sector where the mafia is ever present, getting increasingly organized and now corporatized. 

This article will shed light on five different types of mafia and the waste management sub-sectors within which they operate. 

 1. The unorganized Rag-Picker Gangs

2. The Kabadi Syndicate 

3. The Scrap Mafia 

4. The organized Corporate Mafia 

5. The Political, Administrative and Bureaucratic Mafia  

May 2006: A man dressed in a white shirt, white pants and white shoes barges into our small office in the city of Noida, in Uttar Pradesh, asking for me by name. His name, Satpal Nagar, a relative of a local political big wig belonging to the Gujjar community, who historically have been engaged in farming and other activities, many of whom had become multi-millionaires overnight by selling their land to the government and private developers. Mr. Nagar was an intimidating fellow, 6 foot 2 inches with a heavy frame and big thick hands that looked like they could crush stone. He plonked himself down on the only chair I had in my office and asked me if I was collecting waste from a newly built society located in Noida. I tentatively answered yes, and he proceeded to tell me to stop collecting waste from the that site. When I asked why, he fidgeted a little in his chair and pulled out a country made revolver and put it on the table. No matter how tough you think you may be, the thought of getting shot, that too, over garbage was scary enough for me to defuse the situation by offering him something soft to drink (Coke, Pepsi etc. are called soft drinks in India, as they have no alcohol content). 

Over a conversation, Mr. Nagar revealed that he had the contract of distributing newspapers in the said locality along with the contract to collect scrap  and that he was in the business of trading paper scrap and since many households were giving their paper to our waste collectors, it was affecting his business adversely. A concession was made and I happily accepted not to collect any paper from the said location, with instructions passed down to the collection team. For a period of one-week Mr. Nagar’s hench men stood outside the society and checked the bags in our truck to ensure paper was not being collected. 

 It’s been almost 15 years since that incident and we as an organization have encountered far more scary run-ins with local goon and the mafia, from an kidnapping attempt on one of our employees in Bangalore, physical and verbal assaults on our supervisors, our trucks hijacked for ransom in UP and being forced to pay protection money to operate in Kolkata. This is a brief story of the murky underbelly of the waste management sector in India. 

The unorganized rag picker gangs: There is a hierarchy amongst rag pickers, the have and the have-nots. Most individuals who collect waste from your homes in their rickshaws fall somewhere in this category too, and come predominately from Assam, West Bengal, Eastern UP and Bihar with an overwhelming percentage of them being Indian Muslims, and a small percentage being Bangladeshi Muslims. This hierarchy is broken down as mentioned below:  

Those who walk on foot and collect recyclables from drains, side of roads, dustbins & landfills. These individuals usually work under a contractor, and are bonded to continue working under them as the contractor either pays them advance or keeps part of their payment with him or her. Further, most of those employed by the contractor are from his or her village so if they do run, they can be found with ease. These individuals collect waste in the wee hours of the morning and sell it to their contractors at predetermined rates. The situation at landfills is a completely different ball game, with local mafia elements and contractors controlling who gets the right to segregate waste dumped at landfills according to a fixed charge. Many landfill fires are a result of burning waste such as PVC coated wires, e-waste to recover precious metals.  

Those who use a manual rickshaw to collect recyclables from the side of roads, drains, parks, markets etc. Many of these individuals are either self-employed family operations or work for contractors. They are higher up the ladder and have greater freedom to move around within the contractor network. If they work for a contractor, then the contractor provides them with the rickshaw and living accommodation in most cases. The contractor pays these individuals for the waste they collect on pre-determined rates. In some instances, individuals are self-employed, which means, that they have their family members such as brothers, sisters, wife, kids, brother in-laws, sister in-laws etc. all working on the same cause of collection of recyclables. They set up crude warehouses in urban villages and live in shanties there. What they segregate, they sell to small or large aggregators for cash. 

Those who collect waste from your home, hotels, and malls. This again, is a complex mix and can be broken down into two sperate fragments. Those who work for a contractor and those who are self-employed. From homes, traditionally the practice has been of RWA’s tendering the waste management contract out to a single vendor for door to door collection. But this is not a tender where the RWA pays the collector, it’s where the collector pays the RWA. Though this practice has reduced, substantially, it is still prevalent in many parts of the country. Contractors fight over the rights to collect waste by bidding the highest price, which leads to them then taking on debt from local financers at rates as high as 5% per month. Many are unable to pay, close down over night and head back to their village or a new city to start the process again. In areas where the households pay a disposal fee to private contractors, the collection fee is kept by the contractor and the labor is made to segregate the waste and then sell back to the contractor at fixed rates. The waste that cannot be recycled, such as complex plastic like MLP and other materials that are not of high value, including food waste is dumped on road side dumps from where the it’s then collected and disposed of at landfills by government contractors on a tipping fee model. In many instances, waste which is of low commercial use is burnt at the contractors’ warehouse at night or dumped in drains or open plots of land. Recyclables such as wires with PVC coating is also burnt at these warehouses to recover the valuable metal contents within them.  

Many of these so called shanty warehouses are located in urban villages and the land is owned by local strong men, who provide protection for such activities to take place, as they derive rental income from these contractors on which they pay zero income tax as its all collected in cash. 

 Similarly, hotels and malls all sell their waste in a mixed form to the unorganized sector, which ends up paying these entities either directly or to proxies such as NGO or other private firms. 

There is shift in this system, but not for good. As more and more cities privatize waste management contract’s the model in which the unorganized sector operates is now shifting. It is becoming a hybrid model, where by the municipal contractor, the unorganized sector and the municipal officials work together to benefit each other financially. The government contractor is responsible to collect waste from homes, segregate it, and only dump waste that cannot be recycled, but this rarely happens. In some areas, where private government contractors have made make shift material recovery facilities, the unorganized sector is again engaged to recover the recyclables on fixed fee model, where the unorganized sector pays the private contractor a fixed fee for the right to segregate and recover recyclables. 

 The Contractors: Contractors can be considered either the individuals for whom the waste collectors work for or organizations who have government contracts for an area or with companies, or simply a strong man individual who controls a certain area. In all cases these are the chaps who make the real money. Their goal is to secure their business in a certain area, either through intimidation, bribery, entering into verbal contracts with government contractors in exchange for money to secure rights to collect recyclables from a certain area or by forming a cartel that makes it next to impossible for new entrants to enter the market. From illegal disposal to open burning of waste, it’s all managed through a complex web financial transaction. Everyone is on the pay roll, from police to government employees, without whose collusion very little can happen. Keep in mind, that nobody in this chain is paying any tax whatsoever despite making a minimum of rupees thirty thousand monthly for the really small contractors to tens of lakhs for the bigger ones. 

This system, although operationally efficient, it is a major reason why many MSM’s find it hard to function in this sector, as they can’t compete by offering money for waste; recyclable or not. Zero taxes, no employee welfare, minimum overheads, almost negligent disposal or processing costs make competing the unorganized sector unviable, when you have to incur all the above-mentioned costs and more to operate. 

The Kabadi (Scrap dealer) Syndicate: Who does not love the neighborhood kabaddi? He comes to you house collects your recyclables and pays you for it. Let’s look at this system properly. The kabadi system can be broken down into two components. One servicing the residential side and the other servicing the industrial and commercial side.  

Residential Sector: Local kabaddis servicing residential sectors in many communities across India, both gated and open access colonies have their areas marked. The RWA provides them permission to operate within their societies and in majority of the cases this done through a contract where the kabadi pays the RWA a fee to get access to segregated household waste within a community and then fixes rates accordingly for the defined period the contract at which he buys waste from individual houses. Kabadis are generally interested in only certain types of high value waste, such as newsprint, cardboard, metals and certain types of plastic waste such as HDPE and PET.  

Most if not all of the kabadi’s work for a contractor who ensures that the contract is secured and that no one else enters the said society. Kabadi contractors are notorious in the use of strong-arm tactics such as intimidation to maintain a strangle hold on their areas of operations. These contractors either buy the contract from RWA’s at X rates and then subcontract them to Y for X+ something or have the kabadis sell them the waste that they have purchased from households. In majority of the cases work is subcontracted as it ensures a fixed income with no overheads and also removes all possibility of pilferage from the collection site to the contractor’s warehouse. Kabadi’s who service their contracts themselves, have small little warehouses where they don’t stock goods for more than two days due to space and cash flow limitations. These individuals have to pay households in cash at the time of purchasing the goods. There could be multiple kabadi’s servicing a locality, and this is especially true in large open colonies, but for gated colonies it is one contractor servicing the entire colony. 

Kabadi’s in many cases get the stiff end of the stick. They pay the RWA a fixed yearly fee and then pay household to purchase their recyclables. Most roam neighborhoods on their cycles or rickshaws with a crude weighing scale on which they weigh the waste and pay a fixed fee per kilogram to the household. To compensate for the money that they pay RWA’s and households, these individuals manipulate the weight of goods that they purchase from your homes. Many have now moved to digital weighing scales, that come with a wireless remote, that has the ability to alter the weight without you ever knowing.

There small or medium size make shift warehouses are also places where stolen goods specially those made of metal are sold with ease and for this reason their warehouses are the first place the police checks if there is theft in the neighborhood (mostly grills, metal drain covers, plastic street dustbins, etc). Another way that kabaddi’s get recyclables, especially on highways and within cites is through truck drivers, who often make a quick stop at their make shift sheds to sell items that may be loaded in their trucks. For example, we have caught some of our drivers, on numerous occasions selling small amounts of scrap to kabadi’s en route to our warehouse returning from the client’s site. They will sell small amounts such as ten kilograms of cardboard, five kilograms of iron etc, but they do it on a consistent basis and it all adds up. 

They also act as informants to the police, providing them information about what is happening in a said neighborhood. These individuals rarely do any segregation of waste, as most waste is provided to the in a segregated form and most of not all kabadis at who service housing societies or neighborhoods, simply sell the waste to larger traders or aggregators.  

Commercial/ Industrial Sector: I address this in the next section under Scrap Mafia as there is much overlap and interconnectedness in the way industrial scrap is collected in India. 

Scrap Mafia: Until now, I have been speaking about small time hoodlums, the type you can swat like flies if you have a little local connect or are willing to report them to local authorities. The scrap mafia is a different ball game! Welcome to the Gangs of Wasseypur (Bollywood Movie) where murders, extortion, physical violence and intimidation, corporate, political and police corruption run rampant. You don’t only need a set of big balls, but also brains to be in the collection side of this business.  

12th October, 2017:  My phone rings waking me up from a deep sleep. It’s 1:30 am in the morning and the call is from my supervisor from Bangalore. I have always been wary of getting work calls at odd times such as these, as more often than not this only occur when something bad has gone down. I answer the phone with a groggy hello and on the other side, I hear my supervisor crying, asking me to save his life. Before I can compose myself, someone else jumps on the phone and asks me to come outside the warehouse of a large e-commerce company within thirty minutes or the supervisor will be face grave consequences. Fuck, I am in bed at my home in Delhi, this guy wants me to show up in Bangalore within thirty minutes or him and his boys are going to go town on my supervisor who belongs from a small town in Bihar. 

We had just secured a large contract to manage the waste generated from the warehouse of a large e-commerce company and despite getting threats on numerous occasions, I had taken an executive call to continue with the contract, after all we were used to such elements and had dealt with them in states like UP & Haryana, and this was Bangalore, my thoughts were that nothing serious could come of this. All those beliefs come tumbling down over the next few days as we encountered the wrath of the Bangalore scrap mafia with deep political connects. 

To be continued…

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, this is part one of a series of three articles on this subject matter. Next week the story will continue with information on how the scrap mafia operates and who they are, their links to political parties and corrupt employees of private companies both national and multinational. 

Note: All events mentioned in this article are real and experienced first-hand by our organization and its employees. Further, all information mentioned in this article is from first-hand experience of working in the field of waste management for over fifteen years, both as a private and public contractor, servicing residential, commercial and industrial establishments.

Until we meet again next friday, have a fantastically sustainable weekend!