Latest news with #wastepicker
New York Times
12 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
In India, Immigration Raids Detain Thousands and Create a Climate of Fear
A waste picker from a Delhi slum, who said he had been deported with his pregnant wife and son. A rice farmer in Assam, in India's northeastern corner, who said his mother had been detained by police for weeks. A 60‑year‑old shrine attendant in the western state of Gujarat, who said he had been blindfolded, beaten by the police and then put on a boat. All have been caught up in a widening crackdown on migrants that the Indian government has justified as a national security imperative. Rights groups say the crackdown, which intensified after a terrorist attack in Kashmir in April, has become an increasingly arbitrary campaign of fear against Muslims in India, especially those whose language might mark them as outsiders. Most of those detained in the raids live hundreds of miles from Pakistan, which India has blamed for the attack. Thousands of Indian Bengali-speakers, most of them Muslims, have been rounded up, detained or expelled to Bangladesh. Many of them are from West Bengal, an eastern Indian state where Bengali is the main language; for decades, young people from the state have migrated to big Indian cities elsewhere for work. Several million undocumented Bangladeshis are thought to live in India, entering — legally or illegally — through the porous border that divides the two nations. Indian states have carried out raids on neighborhoods with dense concentrations of Bengali speakers, saying they had evidence of undocumented immigrants there. (Bengali, an official language of both India and Bangladesh, is spoken by tens of millions of people on both sides of the border.) Since mid-July, authorities in Gurgaon, a satellite city of the capital, New Delhi, have conducted what they call a verification drive, intended to identify illegal immigrants. The police in Gurgaon have detained and then released hundreds of people with documents showing they lived legally in India, according to local media reports. Hundreds of mostly poor Bengali speakers, the reports said, preemptively fled the city after the drive began, worried they would be picked up by the police at any moment. Between 200 and 250 people have been detained in the verification drive and ten were identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, said Sandeep Kumar, a public relations officer for the Gurgaon police department. He said claims of people fleeing the city were 'rumors.' In interviews with a dozen people across four Indian states, in neighborhoods that have been raided by the police, Muslim and Hindu Bengali speakers said they had become scared of being caught in the government's crackdown. Avjit Paul, 18, who is Hindu, said he moved to Gurgaon from his home state of West Bengal to work as a cleaner. When his slum was raided, he said, he was detained for five days by the city police, despite showing the officers a state ID card. He was released from police custody only after social workers offered the police additional documents to support his Indian nationality, he said. Millions of Indians lack documentation that could prove their citizenship. Terrified of being detained again, Mr. Paul fled Gurgaon and returned to West Bengal. 'I'm afraid to be caught again like this, because I speak Bengali,' said Mr. Paul, who is now jobless. Rights groups and lawyers have criticized the government's immigration crackdown for a lack of due process. They say that the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., has used April's act of terrorism as a pretext to deepen a systemic campaign of oppression against the country's Muslims. Across Indian states led by the B.J.P., thousands of purportedly Rohingya or Bangladeshi Muslims have been rounded up since the attack. At least 6,500 people were detained in Gujarat, 2,000 in Kashmir and about 250 in Rajasthan, according to the police in each state. Rajasthan set up three new detention centers in May. Supantha Sinha, a lawyer working on detention cases in the city, said the number was closer to 1,000. The exact number of people expelled from India to Bangladesh is unclear. Bangladeshi officials said that roughly 2,000 people were pushed into Bangladesh from India from May to July, but the Indian authorities have not confirmed a figure. The Indian government has had to readmit dozens of people who proved their Indian citizenship after being expelled across the border, according to a report released in July by Human Rights Watch. The government's crackdown has largely targeted Muslim migrant workers from impoverished backgrounds, according to Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. Amer Sheikh, 59, left his home in West Bengal to work in construction in the western state of Rajasthan. Police detained him in June, despite his state ID card and birth certificate, his uncle Ajmaul Sheikh said. After three days in custody, the family lost contact with him. In late June, Danish Sheikh, a 27-year-old waste collector born in West Bengal, was detained by police, along with his pregnant wife and 8-year-old son. After five days in custody, Mr. Sheikh said, the family was deported, left in a jungle and told to walk to Bangladesh. They have been stuck there since, despite having familial land records in India that date back several decades and Indian IDs. 'We don't know when we can go home,' said Sunali Khatun, Mr. Sheikh's wife. Imran Hossain, 60, said he was blindfolded, beaten and put on a five-day boat ride to Bangladesh after Indian police officers raided his neighborhood in the western state of Gujarat. He has struggled to sleep at night. 'I still hear people crying when I try to sleep,' Mr. Hossain said. B.J.P. leaders at both the state and national levels have long described a crisis of 'infiltrators' from Bangladesh threatening India's identity, homing in on border states like Assam. The state's chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, warned in an X post in July about an 'alarming demographic shift,' pledging his state was 'fearlessly resisting the ongoing, unchecked Muslim infiltration across the border.' In Assam, about one-third of the population is Muslim, and the issue of Bengali-speaking identity has been a trouble point for decades. In the state's latest deportation drive, Mr. Sarma invoked a 1950 law that allows the state to deport suspected illegal immigrants, bypassing established tribunals. 'It's absolutely terrifying,' said Mohsin Bhat, a lawyer who has researched citizenship trials in Assam. Malek Oster, a rice farmer who lives in Assam, has spent the past weeks wondering how to get his mother out of government detention. She was taken by the police in early June, he said, and the police will not disclose to him where she is. 'My mother has a voter card, Aadhar card, and the ration card, but the police did not accept that, and we don't know why,' Mr. Oster said, referring to the national ID system. Mr. Oster said his family had never been to Bangladesh. But like many Bengali speakers in India, he increasingly feels like an outsider. 'Due to the crackdown, I fear speaking Bengali when I go outside,' he said. Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.
News24
29-07-2025
- General
- News24
Durban recycling plant turns long-life cartons from trash to treasure
A waste picker makes his daily rounds with a trolley cart, collecting recyclables across the city, part of an informal network powering SA's recycling efforts.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
H&M Foundation-backed Circularity Initiative Expands in India
In 2021, a small pilot project called Saamuhika Shakti launched in Bengaluru, India, with the goal of reducing the amount of textile waste that ends up in landfills while also empowering workers handling that waste. Since then, the initiative has grown exponentially, and now it's being replicated and implemented in 12 additional Indian cities. Funded by the H&M Foundation, Saamuhika Shakti employs informal waste workers to collect and sort discarded clothing in 16 neighborhood sorting centers that feed diverted garments to a central textile recovery facility. Developed by the Circular Apparel Innovation Factory and implemented by waste picker advocacy organization Hasiru Dala, the project aims to divert 800,000 kilograms of post-consumer textile waste and support 500 waste picker livelihoods by 2026. More from Sourcing Journal Walmart Plans to Bring 100K New Indian Small Businesses Online Iskur Denim Joins Denim Deal Circulose and Mango Team Up to Scale Circular Cellulose So far, Saamuhika Shakti has achieved 55 percent of its waste diversion target and supported more than 400 waste pickers. Part of that success lies in the collaborative design of the project, where municipal authorities, NGOs and waste picker collectives jointly set the terms, ensuring shared ownership and long-term viability. 'What makes this model so powerful is that it's not a top-down solution—it has been co-created with waste pickers, who know the problem best,' said Maria Bystedt, program director at H&M Foundation. 'It proves that circularity isn't just about materials or recycling tech—it's about how we design systems that are inclusive, effective and climate-resilient.' Textile waste is a huge problem in India. The country accounts for 8.5 percent of global textile waste or 7793 ktons, according to Fashion for Good. That waste can be broken into three categories: domestic post-consumer (51 percent), pre-consumer (42 percent) and imported post-consumer (7 percent). According to Hasiru Dala, India's waste management is made up of two primary systems—formal and informal. The informal system is completely managed by waste pickers, waste sorters and waste traders, who comb landfills and other waste collection facilities for recyclable materials. Waste pickers often are women and children, and particularly in landfills, they work in extremely difficult conditions due to the elements and risk of contamination from garbage and make very little money. Saamuhika Shakti aims to change that by empowering those waste pickers to improve their working conditions while also raising their profile as essential components of a circular economy. The Saamuhika Shakti project has received more than $20 million in funding from the H&M Foundation in two phases. Along with the foundation, the Circular Apparel Innovation Factory and Hasiru Dala, the initiative has received additional support from Bal Raksha Bharat, BBC Media Action, Sambhav Foundation, Sattva Consulting, Social Alpha, Sparsha Trust, Udhyam Learning Foundation and WaterAid India. Bystedt said that the key to Saamuhika Shakti's success lies in the workers who've been given agency through the project to improve their work conditions and economic standing. 'We're seeing that when waste pickers are recognized as essential climate actors, cities can build solutions that scale and inspire new models of inclusive circularity globally,' she said.
