DHAKA, June 5, 2024 (BSS) - Mim Akhtar, 13, is a six grader student of Grambangla Development Committee School and her father Nayan Sarkar , mother Shilpi Sarkar collect wastes from city's Matuail waste dumping site. Mim used to go to the dumping site regularly with her parents and collect waste materials.
 
Last November, her annual examination began and she took part in two subjects. Later, she was admitted to the hospital with mild fever. Afterwards she was diagnosed with TB disease and died in December.
 
According to a report of the World Bank, one percent people in the cities of Bangladesh earn their livelihood as waste workers. These vulnerable people are deprived of civic amenities as well as healthcare facilities.
 
Physicians and development workers say these people are exposed to serious health risks while collecting the harmful wastes. Sometimes children and teenagers become the victims of accidents and get permanently disabled.
 
The waste pickers are a very poor group of people in the urban areas who make a living by collecting wastes from streets, dustbins or municipal waste dump sites or landfills and selling those.
 
Research Initiatives Bangladesh, a non-governmental development organization (NGO), and the Gram Bangla Development Committee in a joint study have found that about four lakh people are involved with waste-related jobs, one-third of those are women, children and adolescents. Most of them live in slums near the city roads or landfill.
 
According to the data of the Department of Environment in 2009, there are 1,20,000 poor people in Dhaka city who live on collecting and selling discarded waste materials for reusing and recycling purposes, which is worth about Taka one thousand and seventy-one crore annually.
 
The country currently has 522 cities and port-cities where economic and population booming fast. Thousands of tonnes of domestic, industrial, commercial and medical wastes are generated daily in these cities and towns.
 
According to an official estimate of 2005, the daily waste generation in Dhaka city is at least 10,261 tons. Only 60% of its waste is collected through two city corporations. The remaining 40 percent of the uncollected waste is thrown into the ditches around the house, sinks, drains, roadsides and even rivers and canals.
 
Waste workers usually collect discarded paper, garment waste, tin and canned goods, broken glass, iron scraps, syringes, blood and saline bags, plastic bottles, bones etc. Later, they raise quality of these wasters through various processes and sell to the 'Bhangari' shops.
 
According to a study of Gram Bangla Development Committee, most of the waste workers came to Dhaka from the southern and char areas of the country mainly due to poverty and natural disasters. Literacy rate of wasteful family members is only 14.7 percent.
 
Experts say that waste workers are infected with various deadly diseases. Their hands and feet are cut multiple times with sharp objects every day. But they do not treat these wounds properly and the wounds slowly turn to decay.
 
About the life and health risks of these underprivileged waste workers in the society, Executive Director of Gram Bangla Development Committee AKM Maqsood said that collecting waste, including medical waste, is a very dangerous job. Almost all of them collect waste with bare hands and bare feet which leads to various infectious and deadly diseases.
 
The government, however, has formulated National Health Policy-2011 and National Urban Health Strategy-2014 to address these urban poor people's problem. The government is committed to the implement SDG-2030 with the conviction that 'no one will be left behind'. Among 17 goals of the SDGs, five key areas are directly related to waste management.