Trash Picking Generations

Pakistan In Picture

Asem Mustafa Awan

The loader motorcycle carries three generations of trash pickers who cover miles and miles in quest for their sustenance from sun up to sun down. They have spent decades in trash picking, and the loader bike that is either taken on instalments or rented is their most precious belonging. They represent the downtrodden segment of society, and they have no skills except garbage collection and making a living out of it.

Health and education—the basic rights guarantee for every human under the law—are a distant dream for them as they survive on a day-to-day basis. The very basic amenities for human sustenance exist and achieving them is like touching the stars for them.

They are all healthy, as living off the ‘elite leftovers’ is their lifeline and abounds in the trash depending on the location, unlike many others who are but human skeletons and are seen begging on the roads with hollowed eyes and withered skin. Their very presence and their life style should ring a bell as to how society has decayed, and this picture from Khurram Butt carries all three generations who have no other skill.

Will there be a chance or hope for them? is a question that should be placed before policy makers, who draw hefty purses from the presentations done on ‘poverty alleviation’ at national and international forums. All this talk is nothing but hot air, which comes out time and again from higher up with no solution in sight. The adults have doomed destinies but will there be any hope for the minors that are in the loader motorcycle? The answer is a negative one, as life for them starts at the garbage dump and ends at the garbage dump.

These individuals, like many millions, have doomed destinies very much like the ones who, in their quest for the free bag of flour announced by the government, were trampled under the feet of many hungry. These pictures should serve as wakeup calls for the policy makers, as whatever they put in papers failed to materialise in actuality or on the ground. They are humans, and they deserve a chance that is denied to so many millions like them in the land of the pure, which was made with a promise that to date has remained immaterial.