‘Mountain Tales’ review: Where home is a rubbish mountain 20 storeys high
The Hindu
A gut-wrenching story of the poor and marginalised who work and live at Mumbai’s Deonar landfill to earn their daily bread
Rag pickers live off what the rest of the world throws away. They lead invisible lives in the landfills that keep growing, stagnating and putrefying with items discarded by the city’s rich. The dark trail of modern life is seen and felt everywhere.
Journalist Saumya Roy, who spent eight years researching the impact of urbanisation, over-consumption and waste mismanagement in Maximum City, describes it as ‘discarded desires’ of the moneyed-people. The grossness of disparity between the world of the rich and the poor compelled her to explore the lives of rag pickers in 2013, when she co-founded Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro-entrepreneurs.
Several principals of government and private schools in Delhi on Tuesday said the Directorate of Education (DoE) circular from a day earlier, directing schools to conduct classes in ‘hybrid’ mode, had caused confusion regarding day-to-day operations as they did not know how many students would return to school from Wednesday and how would teachers instruct in two modes — online and in person — at once. The DoE circular on Monday had also stated that the option to “exercise online mode of education, wherever available, shall vest with the students and their guardians”. Several schoolteachers also expressed confusion regarding the DoE order. A government schoolteacher said he was unsure of how to cope with the resumption of physical classes, given that the order directing government offices to ensure that 50% of the employees work from home is still in place. On Monday, the Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas (CAQM) had, on the orders of the Supreme Court, directed schools in Delhi-NCR to shift classes to the hybrid mode, following which the DoE had issued the circular. The court had urged the Centre’s pollution watchdog to consider restarting physical classes due to many students missing out on the mid-day meals and lacking the necessary means to attend classes online. The CAQM had, on November 20, asked schools in Delhi-NCR to shift to the online mode of teaching.