NEW DELHI, INDIA – Raju and dozens of children try to climb a giant mountain of rubbish without being seen. A few minutes earlier, with jute bags on their shoulders, they had made their way through a hole in the fence of the largest landfill in the capital of India, New Delhi. It takes them 10 minutes to reach the 65-meter-high top of a rancid garbage pile at the Gazipur landfill.
Eight-year-old Raju is one of hundreds of thousands children who secretly dig into 1300 massive dumps all over India every day in search of sold garbage for recycling. They do it at the expense of their health and safety. “Many times I found syringes,” Raju told VICE World News. His name has been changed to protect his privacy. “When I was younger, it hurt a lot when I was stabbed with needles, but now I don’t cry.”
Generations of the Raju Dalit family have collected garbage. For centuries ridge Waste management in India was handled by the Dalits, a historically oppressed community outside the Hindu social caste system. But recently the government has tried to exclude not only Dalit children but also adults from waste management by not offering them alternative job prospects.
Private companies are now increasingly in control of the country’s waste. Employees and corporations are the only ones who have access to landfills. But Dalit garbage collectors continue to make their way to landfills in search of recyclables.
Although India is currently third largest number of billionaires in the world – 169 – wealth, occupation and social mobility in the country are still inextricably linked with caste. Nine out of 10 Indian billionaires belong to the top Bania caste, traditionally made up of merchants or moneylenders. At the other end of the spectrum, many Dalits, like Raju, remain trapped generation after generation as scavengers.
As India overtakes China in terms of population and litter, the country has made big global pledges to regulate and control its huge litter problem. But experts say government policy is failing because they don’t consult traditional garbage collectors.
“It is not possible to stop the dump or clean up these dumps because the state is excluding the communities that know best what to do with the waste,” Shashi Pandit, president of the All India Garbage Pickers Union Kabadi Mazdour Mahasang. in India, VICE World News reported. “India’s development depends on injustice against these communities.”
Pandit said that in the past, large government projects such as waste-to-energy plants failed due to extremely dangerous levels of pollutant emissions due to the fact that the waste was not segregated.
India’s landfills were last year second largest source of methane emissions in the world, according to satellite observations of the European Space Agency. This is despite India’s global promises to develop innovative solid waste management systems. Lieutenant Governor of New Delhi V.K. Saxena recently argued that have already ceased to be dumped into one of the city’s landfills in Okhla. But VICE World News recorded at least 20 trucks dumping waste into the same landfill over the course of three hours.
India’s 1.4 billion people produce 62 million tons waste every year, according to official estimates. But the World Bank puts the figure in 277 Mt, which weighs the equivalent of at least 554 empty Burj Khalifa buildings. Shortcomings in the country’s waste management system mean that most of this waste ends up in 1,300 registered landfills that have been overfilled for years. Only the landfill in Ghazipur is growing by 10 meters annually.
Only 20 per cent waste in India is recycled. At home, the Raju family separates waste into recyclable and non-recyclable. Those selling for as little as 20 cents include plastic bottles and iron scraps. “Our kids are collecting rich kids’ waste, and that’s what we’ve been doing all our lives,” she told VICE World News. According to an international non-profit organization, at least 10,000 garbage collectors in the capital alone are children. Save the children.
February 2023 report The Delhi Municipal Corporation, said only 61.5 percent of the waste is currently recycled, with the rest sent to landfills where garbage collectors like Raju and his family collect and sort the waste without an official appointment to do so.
Waste management in India rated become a $15 billion industry. Unni, an expert on urban poverty, says garbage collectors are deliberately left out of the system to deprive them of the opportunity to earn higher wages, jobs and property. Recent study found that oppressed Dalits and tribal communities, which make up more than 30 percent of the population, collectively own less than 10 percent of the country’s assets.
“Waste has always been associated with the notion of caste purity in India,” Aravind Unni, an urban poverty expert with the nonprofit Indo Global Social Service Society in India, told VICE World News. “[It’s got to do with the belief] that it should be picked up and thrown near the marginalized of society.”
Even the private companies that control these mountains of rubbish in landfills have caste advantages. The waste-to-energy plan at New Delhi’s Ohla landfill, for example, is a public partnership between Jindal Urban Infrastructure, owned by billionaire Naveen Jindal, and the Delhi government, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Both Jindal and Kejriwal belong to the highest Baniya caste.
Raju and his family are not educated and none of his neighbors go to school. Waste management is their life. “I want to work here and make more money off this garbage,” Raju said when asked what he wants to do when he grows up.
Pandit says this is the only way for their communities to survive without opportunities for social or professional mobility.
“If this disappears, they will lose the last remnants of survival,” he said.
The deputies fired 50 point-blank shots, and when it was all over, the deafening roar was replaced by Beeson’s shrill scream, as seen in the video.
“In utter shock, Beeson’s plaintiff dove back screaming in terror as the deputies’ bullets hit the car, narrowly missing her,” the lawsuit says.
Now, two years after a confrontation on May 7, 2021 with officials from the York County Sheriff’s Office, the mother and son are suing York County and the department for unspecified damages.
“There was a bullet that hit him in the middle of the back of the head,” Mullinax’s lawyer Justin Bamberg said Tuesday at a press conference attended by Beeson. “Never seen anyone get shot in the back of the head if he poses a threat to law enforcement or anyone else.”
Beeson said that she had always supported law enforcement, but the fact that her son was shot shook her faith in the police.
“Just because they’re law enforcement, they didn’t give them the right to do what they did,” Beeson said. “And, you know, I want to be able to have faith in law enforcement and regain my faith that they won’t hurt you.”
NBC News has reached out to York County authorities for comment. So far they have not responded.
Mullinax, 29, lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina, records show. The same records also indicate that he was arrested for breaking and entering and burglary, as well as petty domestic violence. His mother is 48 and also lives in Rock Hill.
Trevor Mullinax in the hospital.Contributed by Tammy Beeson
In court papers filed May 5 in a local civil claims court, Mullinax does not deny that he was unwell before the deputies arrived and the bullets began to fly. He says he was sitting in his pickup truck parked on his family’s property and his mother tried to console him.
“Trevor was just in a very dark place” Bamberg said, who is also a member of the Democratic House of Representatives. “And he contemplated suicide.”
According to Bamberg, a few days before he was shot, Mullinax had “problems with this girl” and kicked the door of her house.
“This led to him being charged with burglary, he didn’t steal anything,” Bamberg said. “It’s not that this charge was actually dropped because it was nonsense.
When the deputies arrivedAccording to the complaint, Mullinax had a shotgun in the truck, but “in no way did he point the weapon at himself” or anyone else.
Meanwhile, a friend or family member called the sheriff’s department asking for a “health check” on Mullinax, the complaint said.
The dispatchers were given the mobile phone numbers of Mullinax and his mother.
Instead of calling numbers, a group of helpers went to the property, and when they got there, Mullinax’s grandfather directed them to the back of the house, where his grandson parked and talked to his mother, the documents say.
Mullinax’s grandfather is talking to a group of deputies.Received by NBC News
“Before arriving at the property where Plaintiff Mullinax was still sitting in his pickup truck, the deputies drew their firearms and were ready to shoot Plaintiff Mullinax and use lethal force before they made verbal contact with him,” court documents say. . .
When they got there, the video shows that they started firing almost immediately.
Mullinax raised his hands and carried out the orders of the deputies, his lawyers insisted.
“At no time before, during, or after the deputies started shooting, did Plaintiff Mullinax raise, aim, or otherwise move the weapon in a manner that would allow the deputies to use deadly force,” the complaint states.
Despite this, the documents state that “Deputies arrested and charged Plaintiff Mullinax with pointing and presenting a firearm to police officers, which did not happen and is not true.”
The charges, according to the complaint, were brought to “cover up” the “absolutely excessive use of lethal force displayed by the deputies.”
According to his lawyers, Mullinax was hit nine times, including once in the back of the head.
Beeson, despite being right next to the pickup truck, was not hit by the gunshots.
Victim’s mother, Tammy Beeson.Received by NBC News
There is no evidence that Mullinax or his mother “committed a crime or attempted to interfere with the arrival of a police officer, intervene or resist arrest,” the complaint says. “On the contrary, all available evidence indicated that the plaintiff attempted to comply within an extremely short period of time immediately after the arrival of the officers.”
A police officer was injured after he was allegedly hit by a driver fleeing a riot early Tuesday morning in Kansas City, Kansas, a police spokeswoman said.
Well, you know, I was a young actress and I had a formal meeting at the Miramax office earlier that day.
And then, at the end of the meeting, which I thought went really well, he invited me to come to the screenings. He said, “Welcome to the Miramax family. You know, come to premieres, shows and so on. In fact, there is one this afternoon. Would you like to come?”
And I said, “Of course.”
And in the end I went to watch a movie with him. The result was just a film, not a screening, but the film “Red Rock in the West.” And, you know, it was right when I had such a nagging feeling that something was going wrong.
And then, after the movie, we walked a few blocks. And he said that he needed to go up to his apartment to get some things and could I just go with him real quick? And I kind of said no, and we talked it back and forth for a minute. There were always some negotiations with him, I tried to defend my position, and then make sure that everything was in order.
I went to his apartment. Once there, we had a long talk about art and cinema. And it seemed to me that he treated me like an intellect.
And I felt that the meeting was going very well, and sort of going on. I didn’t feel safe when I was there. And at some point he got up to go to the bathroom. And he came back in a bathrobe and asked me to give him a massage.
And I was extremely uncomfortable. And I thought, oh my God, no, I don’t like it. And we went back and forth about it.
And then he went to the bathroom again, and this time he came back completely naked. And you know, for me, that has completely changed as well. It just took him to the next location. It was completely disorienting. And I was scared, you know? I was very scared.
And then it became a bit of a cat and mouse game, like how do I get out of there?
And I – it’s hard to understand what someone is trying to do to you when they’re completely naked and they…