AHMEDABAD, India, Oct 3, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Indian rescuers on
Saturday found the body of a 12-year-old “rag picker” under a mountain
of trash which collapsed on her last week.
Neha Vasava was scavenging at the biggest garbage dump in
Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, last Saturday when a huge wall of garbage
collapsed on her and a seven-year-old boy who was with her.
The boy was saved by the locals and other so-called ragpickers, as
his head was still visible.
An estimated four million Indians — many of them children — work
in filthy, dangerous conditions, sifting through trash for metal and
other materials to sell.
“We have found the body of the 12-year-old girl,” a fire department
official told AFP.
The official said the decomposed body had been sent for a
postmortem to ascertain the cause of death.
Rescuers had faced difficult conditions during the search, with
packs of roaming feral dogs and tonnes of suffocating garbage.
The Ahmedabad dump, which receives about 3,500 tonnes of garbage a
day from the city of 5.6 million people, is home to several hundred
impoverished families who work as rag pickers.
According to UNICEF, well over 41 million children aged under 12
are forced to work in South Asia.
India’s coronavirus lockdown is thought to have pushed more
children into work after their parents fell into poverty, experts say.