My worlds are converging in India. It was just brought to my attention that some University of British Columbia journalism students, with support from Frontline, have put together a short documentary on E-waste which features wastepickers in Delhi!

The video is fantastic and very informative.

See the following link to watch: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/

How the Chintan Staff Became a Film Crew and Changed the World

Okay, perhaps the world hasn’t changed …yet, but the Chintan office is currently buzzing with excitement over the organization’s latest activist film project!

Ashina filming in Seema Puri

Ashina Filming in Seema Puri

To create the film, Chintan partnered with Witness, a human rights organization that empowers grassroots NGOs to use documentary film as an advocacy tool. By producing films, such NGOs can publicize human rights violations and the struggles of oppressed communities worldwide. For months Ryan Shlief, a dedicated human rights activist and Witness’s Program Coordinator for Asia, has been training Chintan staff to work as producers, directors, camera crew, and film editors within the documentary filmmaking process.

Dinesh filming Matlib

Dinesh filming Matlib

Thus, documentary film now represents another medium through which Chintan can disseminate information about environmentally and socially just recycling in Delhi. The current film project focuses on wastepickers’ rights in the face of corporate privatization of waste management in India. 

Witness was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel. 

Witness’s slogan: “See It. Film It. Change It.” reflects the transformative potential of storytelling through film. By allowing people to tell their own stories, documentary  film has to capacity to uncover injustices and create counter-narratives to dominant societal norms. Documentary is thus an accessible artistic medium that can act as a catalyst for social change. Documentary also represents a unique opportunity for advocacy as it allows communities to tell their own stories and can enhance the directness through which oppressed peoples communicate with decision makers and the general public.

The Community of Seema Puri Tells their Story

The Wastepicker Community of Seema Puri Tells Their Story

For further information on the project, including a video interview with Bharati, Chintan’s founder and director, see Ryan Shlief’s blog at http://hub.witness.org/en/blog/chintan-production.

Untangling the Knots that Bind Wastepickers

The legal framework that informs interactions between citizens and the state and individuals within a state can be like a knotted ball of string; difficult to find where it ends and where it begins, difficult to figure out who actually pulls the strings.

Given my position as a law student, the staff at Chintan have requested that I dedicate space on my blog to explore the interaction between wastepickers, Chintan and the law. This post therefore represents the first in my new series of bLAWgs: Legal Literacy at Chintan. This series will begin with an overview of the legal issues that Chintan tackles. More in depth case studies will follow in the weeks to come.

In New Delhi, Chintan advocates for wastepickers. The dispossessed. People who do not enjoy the same type of citizenship, the same rights to life and livelihood that middle class Indians do. As a result, Chintan often finds itself acting as an intermediary between wastepickers and the state, or, wastepickers and the police.

Santoo was brutally beaten by police when he was accused of stealing while actually collecting waste for recycling. No charges were laid. Today, Santoo fights back as a leader within the wastepicker community.

Santoo was brutally beaten by police when he was accused of stealing while actually collecting waste for recycling. No charges were laid. Today, Santoo fights back as a leader within the wastepicker community.

For example, Santoo, one of Chintan’s most charismatic leaders, is dedicated to uniting wastepickers to prevent the arbitrary use of police force where wastepickers are simply doing their jobs. United, wastepickers represent a more formalized and publicly recognized work force. Divided, wastepickers become invisible and are vulnerable to police brutality and further infringements on their civil liberties. Chintan is in the process of setting up a distress line to assist wastepickers.

Beyond managing one-off interactions between wastepickers and the police, Chintan also aids in the domestic implementation of international law. For example, Chintan’s “No Child in Bins” program directly contemplates international legal norms abolishing child labour as well as India’s policy on eliminating child labour. The “No Child in Bins” program provides educational support through learning centres to the children of wastepickers and children surviving through wastepicking.

Classroom in Seema Puri: 3 to 5 year olds

The “No Child in Bins” campaign aids in implementing international and domestic laws banning child labour.

Chintan is also active on the international scene, advocating for India’s urban poor throughout the development of international agreements. For example, Chintan is part of the international climate justice movement, seeking to have the work that wastepickers do in curbing climate change recognized within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Recyling Centre in Bhopura

Bhopura Recycling Centre

Wasterecyclers are vital to climate change mitigation in India. For example, manufacturing goods from recycled materials uses less energy than using new inputs. In addition, wastepickers prevent many paper products from entering landfills, concomitantly preventing the release of methane from the decomposition of such materials. Finally, wastepickers reintroduce used paper into production thus relieving some of the pressure on trees to provide all of India’s paper needs. Yet, funding through the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to aid in this vital service has evaded wastepickers thus far, focussing instead on end of pipe solutions. 

For a factsheet on wastepickers and climate change see: http://www.no-burn.org/article.php?id=729  

Also see “Ragpickers lose jobs as world tackles climate change”  http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/enviornment/ragpickers-lose-jobs-as-world-tackles-climate-change_100203268.html

Coming soon: Focus on Police Brutality – know your legal rights. 

“Who speaks for the people on the land from Asia to Africa to the Americas?”

         - Vandana Shiva - Physicist, Environmental Activist and Ecofeminist based in New Delhi, India

I arrived in New Delhi and have spent the past 10 days adjusting to the climate, culture and communities in India’s capital. I have been overwhelmed with the kindness and generosity of an Indian family that took me in for my first few days of travel, have been moved by Indian art, eaten delicious food, developed a fascination with Bollywood and am also coping with record-breaking heat, language barriers, thick smog, congested, horn-honking traffic, astounding poverty and a whole array of digestive problems.

First Day in India: Jet Lagged Jacqui

First Day in New Delhi, June 21, 2009

Yet, even while the ground in New Delhi seems to be ever shifting, I finally feel like I have found some footing. Thus, I am now sitting down to write the story of my host organization, Chintan, and the community of wastepickers that Chintan services. I will continually update this story as it unfurls, and as I further embed myself in Chintan’s grassroots work focused on environmental justice in one of the world’s fastest growing economies and most populated cities.

While I am at Chintan I will be playing multiple roles. In a ten week period, I will be developing a composting kit for residents of New Delhi, conducting primary research on compensation for methane capture conducted by New Delhi’s wastepickers and building technical capacity among Chintan staff around information dissemination through video, photography and blogging. Finally, I will be blogging myself, to bring the stories of wastepickers and urban poverty in India to a North American audience.

Door to Door Segregation

Door to Door Segregation

This blog represents a major challenge for me. As a privileged outsider from the west I feel ill equipped to relay the story of a community so far removed from my own. Indeed, a community enduring environmental injustice brought on by my own.

However, I care deeply about holding myself accountable to the wastepickers of New Delhi and Chintan in representing their story accurately and in a culturally appropriate manner. Thus, I welcome and indeed appreciate any critique of the representations that I portray in this blog. Please read my words, watch the videos that I post and analyze my photographs. I cannot help but bias these representations with my own cultural baggage. I want that bias to be laid bare in the comments and critiques that permeate the commentary on my posts. I also welcome an ongoing dialogue about the appropriate role, if any, of westerners in “developing” countries, particularly with respect to western representations of “the Other” through multi-media.

Having delineated my own ethical dilemmas, I will now begin the story of Chintan and wastepickers as I see it…

Chintan’s mission is to address multiple problems simultaneously: waste management, urban poverty, and climate change among others. As such, this organization works with and for India’s waste experts, the urban poor, who are responsible for the majority of waste management and recycling that happens in the country. For wastepickers, recyclables are a commodity that if segregated from waste, provides a meager livelihood. Yet, as a result of their recycling efforts, wastepickers provide a vital environmental service to a nation undergoing unprecedented urbanization and rapid industrialization. Wastepickers ensure recycling and reuse of many materials that would otherwise end up in Delhi’s bursting landfills.

Segregation of Waste

Segregation in the Gazipur Community

Thus, Chintan works with wastepickers to increase capacity for their recycling. Furthermore, in recognition of this vital service, Chintan works to improve the working conditions, health and status of wastepickers and their families in New Delhi. Chintan has a number of campaigns and programs working to accomplish these tasks. For example, Chintan advocates for wastepickers at all levels of government, and conducts campaigns demanding that residents of New Delhi segregate their waste at its source to reduce wastepicker’s exposure to hazardous materials. Chintan also helps organize wastepickers into a variety of workers collectives. Finally, Chintan provides educational support for the children of wastepickers who often do not attend or complete state-run school programs.

Learning through song

Chintan Learning Centre in Nizamuddin

Over the next two months I will fill in the details of these programs and gain insight into how Chintan’s advocacy work and programs play out on the ground. I look forward to the challenging weeks ahead. 

I have never been to Washington, DC. So, as my plane took off from the west coast and began its journey across the US a couple of hours ago, a sense of excitement took hold. I am really looking forward to touching down in DC, the location of so many important political decisions that affect even me, a Canadian. Granted, I have spent some time in the US, and even took off from the Seattle airport having just spent Memorial Day weekend at a music festival in George, Washington. Somehow, DC seems different.

The Gorge at George

The Gorge at George

I am equally excited to meet the other Peace Fellows that will be receiving training through the Advocacy Project this week. We are a group of about 40 students being sent around the world to aid with capacity building within grassroots organizations working for social change.

I am heading to New Delhi, India with another AP Fellow, Ted Mathys, where we will be working with Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group on issues of environmental injustice within the informal waste-sector. I am nervous about spending time in India and working with a grassroots NGO. In fact, I have completely shied away from international work until now.

Throughout my life as a student, I have focused my work on local issues and have always found many cultural and sustainability challenges to work through in my own back yard. For instance, in working with cattle ranchers on sustainable farming policies for the Canadian prairies, I encountered many communication and trust barriers as an urban vegetarian environmental activist. However, I have found facing these barriers incredibly rewarding and have ultimately made many wonderful friendships while working through cultural differences at a local level.

Yet, upon finishing my undergraduate degree and entering law school, international work has landed in my lap. Increasingly I am asked to work on international environmental law projects and to present my viewpoints on the impacts of this law on sustainable development around the world. Having never worked in a ‘developing’ country I feel uncomfortable adding my perspective into the international environmental law dialogue. Thus, I have signed on to intern in India, and look forward to learning form the people at Chintan and the other AP fellows about how treaty law plays out in practice in New Delhi.

For now, my departure date to India is a few weeks away and as a result I still have time to reflect on where I will be going and what kind of changes this experience will bring to my life. As my plane begins its descent into Reagan International Airport I let the Fleet Foxes lull me to sleep and put both my excitement and apprehensions around what is to come in the back of my mind.