Portraits from Wasteland
Thirteen-year-old Salman’s day starts at 6 am when he sets off from his home at Shahbad Daulatpur to Rohini Sector 18. Once there, he begins his work: scrounging through garbage. Salman is a wastepicker, one of the three lakh wastepickers in the Capital. One day, Salman hopes to go to school.
He has many such dreams but most don’t look close to being realised. On a Friday this month, however, there was a slight change in Salman’s daily routine as he inaugurated a photography exhibition in the city. ‘Flowers in the Dust: The waste-pickers of Delhi’, was a solo exhibition on rag-pickers in Delhi, the first of its kind to be held this month in the Capital and is set to return to the city in August.
For Kausiki Sarma, the photographer behind these frames, the four months she spent visiting two Delhi slums, Shahbad Daulatpur near Rithala and Masoodpur in Vasant Kunj, were an eye-opener. Structures of mud, some with roofs of tin or tarpaulin, and others with no roofs at all, children running around helping their parents in waste-picking, oblivious to the overwhelming stench that hung around the area —Sarma was moved by what she saw.
A study conducted by the National Labour Institute (NLI) in 1997-98 found waste-picking to be the fourth largest occupation for street children in Delhi. Most children help their parents collect, segregate and sell waste. “They face harassment from policemen, municipal authorities and private contractors,” says Sarma, who is now a full-time photographer. Till a couple of years ago, she was sitting in front of a computer, studying scores of excel sheets “helping beverage manufacturing companies make more moolah”.
“My first salary brought me happiness, a fancy camera and a change of heart,” says the 28-year-old who did her Masters in Operational Research from the University of Delhi. Back in college, she used to paint t-shirts for ‘People Tree’, an outlet based in Delhi that sells products using eco-friendly techniques.
Growing up in the hills of Assam, Sarma led a protected childhood. Years later, away from home, she realised her heart wasn’t in the job. In March 2010, she put in her papers and chose to work as an assistant director on a documentary, ‘A measure of Impunity’, for the Centre for Northeast Studies and Policy Research. The documentary was on the impact of armed conflict on women in Assam and Nagaland.
In 2011, Sarma met members of the Control Arms Foundation of India and Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network and began collaborating with them, collecting testimonies of survivors of gun violence in Manipur and Assam. “My photographs are an honest portrayal of peoples’ stories,” she says.
uRL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/portraits-from-wasteland/966050/0