Ramzan shopping revelry leaves behind a pile of trash

During Ramzan in Hyderabad, Charminar is crowded with tourists and food bloggers, posing a challenge for sanitation crews.

All roads lead to the Charminar during Ramzan in Hyderabad. As citizens, tourists, food bloggers and walkers troop to the heritage precinct through the day and night, what they experience and what they leave behind is posing a challenge to the civic body. 

At 11 p.m. on Sunday night, the sanitation crew sit near the sidewalk of Pathergatti chit chatting. Similar crews await the exit of milling crowds before getting down to work. The road near Madina junction is so crowded that some of the workers get inside the Ashoorkhana and wait. “Every year we go through this. But this year there is a lot more plastic waste,” says Savitri, who is part of the sanitation crew.  

By 3 a.m., the shoppers and hawkers disappear from the arterial road while some of them move closer to Charminar. While the people are not there, the cobblestoned path and the asphalt road is covered with the plastic trash, packaging material, discarded food and waste water thrown out of the shops after day’s business. Walking is dangerous as the plastic sheets and water make it tricky and slippery on the smooth stones.

“The immersive experience of the place is ruined by the trash. There are no waste bins in sight. Heritage sites have zoning regulations where plastic and other disposables are not allowed. Most of the waste is generated by the hawkers who throw the stuff where they sell,” says Sibghat Khan, an architect who leads heritage walks in the area. If there are more waste baskets and zoning regulations the problem can be solved easily, he says.

“This is non-stop work. Every day we are making five trips. In each trip we remove about 1 tonne or 1.2 tonnes of trash,” says another sanitation staff worker. The staffers are outsourced workers who get paid ₹18,000 per month. While the sanitation staff work in three shifts to remove the trash, by 6 a.m. the photography crews walk in for pre-wedding and post-wedding shoots at the site. The photogs guide the couples to acrobatic poses, their aides move out trash that inevitably makes it to the frame.