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Journalism of Courage
Mumbai, November 22: Mumbai8217;s army of ragpickers who trawl the streets looking for recycleable material have had enough of the thin plastic carry bag, better known as the jhabla.
8220;Halka maal hain, bilkul nahin chalta.8221; 25-year-old Rana Haldar peeps out of a putrefying rubbish dump in the city8217;s slum and scrap suburb Dharavi. Haldar ignores the thin plastic bag and rifles around the bin looking for tins and paper.
Ragpickers have welcomed the government8217;s proposal to ban thin carry bags and instead introduce the thicker bags of a minimum thickness of 80 gauge. 8220;It will make our job far easier,8221; Rahim says. Squatting on his pavement shop at Dharavi, a wizened sixty-something scrap trader Abdul Haq has had enough of the thin plastic bag. 8220;Yeh jhabla nahin, jhamela hain,8221; curses the grizzle bearded trader, separating the carry bags from a mound of plastic waste. The rest of the plastic is sold to bigger traders for Rs three a kg, but as the thin bags are a strict no-no, Haq has to separate them from his precious pile. The thick plastic bags are melted down into little pellets, the raw material for a thriving industry which makes buckets, pipes and footwear out of them.
But the thin bags sit in a sack on his roof. 8220;Small shop owners like us don8217;t buy these bags, nobody wantsthem,8221; scrap dealer Abdul Hamid adds. 8220;The government must ban these bags. When factories stop producing thin bags, the public will automatically stop using them,8221; Haq advises. He then goes on to extol the virtues of paper bags to curious bystanders. 8220;The paper at least dissolved in water, but not these plastic bags.8221; On the Dadar beach, ragpicker Dattaram Kadam rummages through a rubbish tip with a stick. Thin plastic bags don8217;t figure on his list, but the thicker milk pouches do. He washes the thick milk bags in the sea, dries them before selling them for as high as Rs 20 a kg. 8220;Thicker bags are of great use to us,8221; he says.
