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A long-tailed lizard dances in and out of the gaps in the asbestos sheet ceiling of Gunja and Chand Singh’s new house in Tughlakabad village, a neighborhood in the Indian capital.
It is about 3pm, and the couple is sitting in their bedroom sipping tea their younger son, Arjun, has just made.
Gunja and Chand, among India’s four million waste pickers, moved into their bare-brick home in October and are house-proud.
It took them 15 years of back-breaking work and sacrifices to save enough money to buy a plot of land in March 2022. To construct the house and pull themselves and their two school-going teenage sons out of the nearby slum where they lived for 12 years, they took a loan from the man who sold them the plot.
They kept their old shanty — their old home — and the adjoining godown, a storage area with three walls and a plastic and bamboo roof, both a short walking distance from their new house. This godown is where Chand separates paper, cardboard, plastic, and other waste material that he and the workers he hires collect from neighborhoods to sell to recyclers.
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Gunja and Chand are waste pickers who, despite being able to buy a plot of land in recent years, are now struggling due to rising living costs and debt [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]
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