Vaccine scavengers free#

If theyвЂ™re lucky, the person recovers, she says, adding: вЂњIf not, what can we do?вЂќДЄssociated Press writers Tom Odula in Nairobi Farai Mutsaka in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report. Moreover, the stigma associated with waste workers in India means they are often turned away from such facilities.ДЄny illness means visiting a drugstore, not a doctor, for medicine.

Vaccine scavengers free#

To get the free vaccine from an overburdened public hospital, she would have to wait there for days, and each day away from work is one without food on the table. At private hospitals, each shot is sold for 250 rupees ($3.45), but they are free at government hospitals. India said it will give vaccines to everyone over 45 starting April 1. вЂњThe vaccine is just another, and very dramatic, example of an exclusion that has prevailed before COVID-19 came on the horizon,вЂќ said Jeffrey, who co-authored a book on waste in India in 2018. That many of these workers in India belong to poor Muslim or Dalit communities, who once were known as вЂњuntouchablesвЂќ at the bottom of the countryвЂ™s caste system, adds a layer of prejudice.

They often are already poor, moving to unfamiliar cities to eke out a living by sorting garbage, says Robin Jeffrey, a professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.

The work is dangerous, and injuries are common, so governments have an incentive to not recognize them or provide benefits like health care, she said. In Mexico, scavengers help municipal workers on garbage trucks and often collect trash from neighborhoods not served by authorities. Chintan estimates that each year, those like her save the local government over $50 million and eliminate over 900,000 tons of carbon dioxide by diverting waste away from landfills. Manuwara Begum, 46, lives in a cardboard hut behind a five-star hotel in the heart of New Delhi and feels the inequity keenly. вЂњIf they are not vaccinated, then the cities will suffer,вЂќ Mukherjee said. Few have their own protective gear or even clean water to wash their hands, said Chitra Mukherjee of Chintan, a nonprofit environmental research group in New Delhi. The pandemic has amplified the risks that these informal workers face. But unlike those municipal workers, they usually are not eligible for the coronavirus vaccine and are finding it hard to get the shots. They are among the estimated 20 million people around the world - in rich nations and poor - who are pivotal in keeping cities clean, alongside paid sanitation employees. And every day, thousands of these informal workers climb the precarious slopes to pick through what can be salvaged. Armed with plastic bags, they plunge their bare hands into the garbage and start sorting it.Д®very day, more than 2,300 tons of garbage is dumped at the landfill at Bhalswa that covers an area bigger than 50 football fields, with a pile taller than a 17-story building. NEW DELHI (AP) - The scavengers wait patiently for a dump truck to tip the trash on the summit of the landfill outside New Delhi. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.