|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
WHEN you see rag-pickers, you feel sorry for them. Little children deprived of their education rights can be seen scavenging garbage dumps in your locality for plastics, paper and metals. Although they don’t steal anything and make ends meet by selling the waste to scrap dealers, we do look down upon them. There’s another category which collects shiploads of foreign scrap, unload it on ports, dismantle it, sell it, making millions. Many take pride in flaunting such relationships, "Our daughter is engaged to a boy, whose family is one of the big-time ship-breakers of Gujarat."
Explaining his business, he said he bought many discarded, disputed, or abandoned ships during auctions by shipping companies without knowing what goods were loaded in the ships and in what condition. Then he broke the ships on the shores of Gujarat and made big profit sometimes. Meanwhile, his wife offered me some foreign tinned snacks. As I refused, she said, "Don’t worry, they are made from the broken ship." Every other day we hear that a lot of toxic, radioactive material also comes along with the ship waste, making India a dumping ground. I asked a scrap dealer once, "What equipment do you have to screen this waste material?" He replied, "My eyes themselves are like a set of screening machines." Once a middle-aged woman complained to her husband, "Look that man is ogling at me." The husband said, "He must be a scrap dealer."
|
||
|
|
||
Once, on a flight to
Mumbai I met a businessman, who was in the business of ship breaking.
We hit it off immediately and he invited me over to his house in
Bandra.