Invisible Yet Indispensable: The Role of Safai Sathis in India’s Waste Management Economy

Waste pickers are often known as ragpickers in India’s colloquial language. Estimated between 1.5 million and 4 million, they are unsung heroes in the complex urban waste management system and undertake backbreaking activities like salvaging, sorting, and segregating the recyclable refuse, which is much needed for environmental sustainability. Though important, they remain at the bottom rung of the ladder of collective amnesia and thus often highlight invisibility.

The Unseen Backbone of India’s Waste Management Economy

India generates over 10% of the world’s total waste, and it is one of the biggest providers to global waste streams. To manage this colossal burden the country depends on an informal workforce—comprising millions of waste pickers, segregators, and recyclers, often working without official recognition or benefits. The Safai Sathis are most integral part of this ecosystem performing an important function in the process of segregation, cleaning, and dispatching recyclables to material recovery facilities (MRFs). Estimates suggest that between 1.5 million and 4 million waste pickers work across urban India, collecting and sorting waste at every level of the disposal chain—from households to landfills (International Research Journal of Environment Sciences, 2017). These workers are the backbone of recycling and have greatly contributed to the achievement of India’s high recycling rates of around 70% for PET bottles, higher than any developed country like the USA, where only 31% of PET bottles are recycled.

Operating at the lowest rungs of the urban economy, these workers extract recyclable materials from unsegregated waste streams at landfills, dump sites, and from household waste bins. This invisible workforce, made up mainly of workers from poor communities, ferrets material up the chain of informal recyclers-to-formal recyclers. Notably, its labor saves scarce resources and reduces the environmental impact from the accumulation of waste inasmuch as 100% of glass waste gets recycled and 50-80% of plastics and paper wastes are recycled. 

The contributions of the Safai Sathis are not limited to waste management and public health; they also add up to environmental conservation, but there’s often no formal recognition; no job security; and no safety nets for them. This achievement underlines a paradox: it takes an informal, stigmatized workforce to produce that which structured systems can’t deliver. Their efforts ammount to 100% of the country’s recycling and fill crucial gaps in municipal solid waste management (MSWM). Yet this vital contribution unrequited shows a paradox of dependence and despisement.

Navigating Precarity: The Challenges Confronting Safai Sathis
The demographic composition of this workforce is extremely embedded in societal discrimination. WIEGO, among other studies, finds that 90 percent of Pune’s waste pickers are Scheduled Castes, and this corresponds with 90 percent of waste pickers across the nation being women. This triad of caste, class, and gender positions them at the bottom of informal labor hierarchies in cities. Most of them are illiterate, unskilled, and burdened by generational poverty, compounded by their migratory status. An eight-state study (2021-2022) reported that sanitation workers, 88% of whom had migrated from other states for economic sustenance, were faced with bureaucratic hurdles—23% did not have papers to claim ration cards, and 15% did not know how to apply. This exclusion manifests as limited access to government schemes, with only 67% owning bank accounts and a mere 21% of these being Jan Dhan accounts.

Health Hazards: A Silent Epidemic
The working environment of waste pickers is risky. Prolonged exposure to toxic substances and the repeated strain from doing physical chores are taking heavy health tolls. The 2017 study at the Deonar dumping area in Mumbai enumerated prevalent morbidities among the waste pickers:
– Respiratory ailments (28%) like chronic cough and dyspnea.
– Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) due to repetitive bending and lifting of heavy loads.
– Gastrointestinal distress, including nausea and dysentery

Attention is sometimes drawn to the Deonar dumping site either by the fires caused by methane emissions or by some controversial municipal proposals, such as herbal deodorants to dispel the stench. However, for the local population, the toxic air, smoke filled homes, and unsanitary disposal systems are a given, not breaking news. For a long, research scholars and advocacy bodies, including the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), have scrutinized the pathetic living conditions in the area. Chandrika Rao, director at Apnalaya,notes, “The life expectancy of people still hovers at 39 compared with an urban average of 73.5 years in Maharashtra.” Besides, a TISS report on the socio-economic vulnerabilities of M-East ward, where the dumping ground is located, revealed alarming levels of malnutrition, respiratory illnesses, and tuberculosis.
Ironically, it was Purva Dewoolkar, affiliated with a TISS initiative to clean up the ward, who discovered the biggest perpetrator not in the dump but in a medical-waste incinerator run by a private company behind the depot.This situation underlines the compound nature of health risks to those who labor and reside in close proximity to a waste dump, fueled by environmental degradation and ineffective regulatory controls. To address this, systemic interventions would be needed to prevent long-term negative impacts on vulnerable populations. Inadequate access to protective gear and healthcare keeps vulnerability cycles alive. Sylvia,waste picker, so vividly complains about such systemic apathy: “Healthcare should be universally accessible.
Instead, we are treated even worse by medical facilities.”

Social Protection: A Critical Safety Net
The systemic exclusion of Safai Sathis (waste pickers)from governmental welfare schemes starkly reflects their marginalisation within public policy frameworks. Migrants form a substantial sector of this workforce, with a 2021 UNDP study finding that 88% of surveyed waste pickers are migrants. This demographic faces myriad barriers to accessing social protection, including the nonavailability of identification documents such as Aadhaar or caste certificates. As a result, 23% of the surveyed waste pickers do not possess ration cards; only 0.5% have caste or income certificates-essential documents for access to social welfare entitlements.

Migrant status cuts across inter-state lines – most of the migrant Safai Sathis, recruited from other states, are outside the purview of local welfare schemes due to the absence of inter-state portability in benefits. Systemic challenges have been added to that under India’s Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act (1979); due to its design to regulate working conditions, it is often under-implemented. Gender disparities also exist within this workforce. Among the waste pickers, women are the major constituency; they face greater risks at work and get paid for less than males. While this is not the only reason for the lack of access to healthcare and financial safety nets, it does disproportionately affect women, who often shouldered household responsibilities in addition to their labor-intensive jobs. The vulnerabilities of migrant waste pickers display the intersection of socio-economic inequities and poor policy frameworks. In this regard, acknowledging the inter-state nature of their labor helps design social protection inclusive mechanisms, such as universal identification systems, portable welfare benefits, and targeted financial aid. Unless these structural deficiencies are addressed, Safai Sathis continue cycling in poverty, marginalized from the same systems they are meant to be helped by.

Economic Paradox: Contribution Without Compensation
The waste pickers who drive India’s high recycling rates are uncompensated and unrecognized. Their income relies on scrap dealers, who purchase recyclable materials at negligible rates. This kind of economic structure traps waste-pickers in subsistence-level earnings, without even a prospect of salaries, social security, or pensions. Additionally, 40-50% of surveyed waste workers in cities like Delhi and Jaipur did not have access to even basic bank accounts, again pointing to systemic exclusion.

The Saamuhika Shakti program is a model initiative for such efforts. From 2020 through 2023, more than 2,800 waste pickers and their families obtained access to social security, while improved water and sanitation services came to 5,900 people. Another 200 micro-entrepreneurs among the waste pickers became financially independent through skill-building programs. Education for 11,000 children in waste-picking communities has also been made accessible through the initiative. Such initiatives notwithstanding, the sector continues to remain plagued with issues of poor working conditions, inequality in gender dimensions, and lack of policy recognition. The informal nature of the sector also strips away safety nets for workers and
dignity in work. For India to maximize the benefits of its circular economy, it needs systemic change to ensure the incorporation of waste pickers into formalized systems that guarantee them fair compensation, upgrading work conditions, and acknowledging broader societal contributions.

Bridging the Gaps: Policy Recommendations

To rectify this inequity, it is important to mainstream waste pickers into regular MSWM systems. Examples like Pune’s SWaCH cooperative indicate how organizing waste pickers can empower them to bargain for better renumerations and social security coverage. However, such isolated successes need to be replicated across the country. There is a critical need for a set of strategic policy interventions that acknowledge their labor value, extend social protection coverage, and provide paths for upward mobility.

1. Streamlining Beneficiary Identification and Inclusion
   Substantially, one of the first steps to increasing access to social protection is to make the eligibility identification process of the beneficiaries more streamlined under various government schemes. In fact, integrated databases that would centralize Safai Sathis’ information could easily enable more accurate targeting of benefits, reduce duplication, and avoid exclusion errors. In addition, digital integration could provide easier access to services from the government for these marginalized workers and, perhaps more importantly, those with little or no education and who are likely illiterate.
2. Portability of benefits
   Portability of social protection benefits is an essential intervention that can mitigate systemic issues associated with the lives of migrant workers (Interstate) like Safai Sathis, whose livelihoods are closely interwoven with periodic seasonal migration. The One Nation, One Ration Card initiative perfectly reflects a transformative movement in India’s welfare architecture by allowing food subsidy coverage (PDS) to the poorer sections of 37% of India’s migrant population without hindrance from state borders. This initiative leverages Aadhaar-based authentication and portability for 10 crore seasonal laborers, thus alleviating exclusionary barriers inherent in domicile-centric welfare frameworks. Operational bottlenecks, such as delays in Aadhaar integration and differences in state-level infrastructural readiness, however temper its effectiveness. Opening up the parameters of ONORC and adding other programs related to healthcare, housing, and educational subsidies contributes to the establishment of an even more systemic net of protection for migrant communities, doing away with limitations disjointed welfare provisions pose
3. Expanding Wage Security and Formal Employment Opportunities
   The integration of Safai Sathis into formal labor frameworks, such as wage guarantee programs, would provide them with a stable income, particularly during times of economic distress. Similar to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), urban wage guarantee programs can help secure the livelihoods of informal sanitation workers, while also recognizing their role in urban sanitation and environmental conservation.
4. Streamline Enrolment Procedures
   Most of the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have prevented Safai Sathis from receiving benefits time and again would be bypassed if enrolment procedures were streamlined. Self-registration platforms would be created and what are regarded as unnecessary demands of documentation abolished so that these workers could avail themselves of social services and safeguards without suffering undue delay or hindrance