Toxic Mayapuri

I've been teaching in Mayapuri (again) for the past six weeks, and loving it. I love the teaching, I adore my students, but Mayapuri itself is a toxic waste dump. Now that I have had the opportunity to visit some of the other slums in Delhi, what I had been told about Mayapuri has been confirmed. It is certainly the worst slum in the worst environment of all the slums that Asha is involved with. I've written about Mayapuri before but on my second time here, I've really started to notice how bad this place is for my students and their health, even by Delhi standards. So what's so bad about the environment of Mayapuri?

Well, Mayapuri is an industrial area, chock-full of factories belching every kind of pollutant imaginable into the air. This place was set aside as a non-residential area, but now there are thousands of people living here. I work in the area imaginatively named Mayapuri Industrial Area Phase II. The main role of this place is to take scrap metal, crashed cars, broken bits of machinery and anything else made of metal, then manually smash it into its component parts for re-sale. The smell from the factories, and the piles of burning rubbish that can't be re-sold (like bits of rubber and soft furnishings of wrecked cars) pervades every crack and corner here. The ground is filthy - who knows how many litres of oil and engine grease have seeped into the dirt? When I walk to work from the bus stop, my feet literally turn black - it's not a metaphor. The photo at the top shows the rubbish dump that is in the middle of the street - small kids pick over this pile for anything salvagable. The second photo is of a worker manually smashing a scooter into spare parts.

And it's not just the usual industrial pollutants. As the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is unfolding, I learnt that prior to that incident, the world's worst radiation accident in the previous five years had been at Mayapuri. In April 2010, one person died and seven were critically injured, when radioactive material arrived in Mayapuri for recycling. The material stayed in the shop for six weeks before the death and strange illness of the workers was investigated. Who knows how many people came into contact with the radioactive Cobalt-60, and what the long-term health impact will be? In a place as toxic as Mayapuri, how can the effects of radiation be separated from the effects of every other industrial pollutant known to science? How will my students be affected in the future?


In my previous blog about Mayapuri I showed some photos of the homes in which my students live. Last week I went to visit a worse area, the squalor and filth of which was unbelievable. This area is called Khazan Basti and is regarded by the Mayapuri slum-dwellers as a slum, ironically. The photo shows some of the homes, along with the permanent standing water with the pigs wallowing in it. I took the photo standing on the railway line, which runs right in front of the houses.

One of my brightest students lives here. It's a completely different thing when you see pictures of the world's poorest people on TV and in the newspapers, to when you know them personally, spend time with them every day, know their hopes and dreams and actually see them as people, not just unsettling images. Mayapuri is a sobering place.

And here are some of the people. The little girls are metal pickers - they start working at the age of about four years, dragging a magnet through the dirt around the factories, trying to find the tiniest scraps of metal for re-sale. If they are really successful, they might earn Rs20 (about 50c) in a day. They don't go to school, although their brothers often do. Education is not valued highly in Khazan Basti.

All of this makes the achievement of some of my advanced students even more remarkable. To come from this sort of environment, to not only complete 12 years of school education, but to go on and study at university is an incredible testimony to their powers of concentration and persistence. The environment in which they live is appalling, but their life stories are inspirational, and that's why I go to work every day. I breathe the awful fumes, and cough all the way home on the overcrowded bus, but I keep going back, because they keep wanting to learn. These are amazing people.