Sweeping Streets for Gold for a Living! Meet the Early Morning Sweepers who Filter Gold Dust
Mangaluru : Their Future Lies in the Dirt ! And we are talking about the early morning sweepers who filter gold dust from the City’s streets, in front of the jewellery shops, and later sell it back to the jewellers. Now that the rains have stopped for a while, these sweepers are back with their business, whose ‘excavation’ starts during the wee hours and continues till the jewellers open their shops in the morning. And you could find these sweepers mainly in Bhavanthi Street and Car Street viciniteis in the City, where there are many jewellery shops.
Occasionally, they also stumble upon costly stones besides grains of gold and silver. They also sweep the roads with small brushes and often find coils and currency notes that customers drop by mistake. Despite carrying shallow pans, trowels and small buckets, the sweepers collect mud and dirty water with their bare hands. When at work, they hardly talk to each other. However, their mechanical coordination suggests that they have been doing this activity for decades.
Team Mangalorean who spotted Muniraju, who was sweeping the street in front of a jewellery shop in Car Street area, speaking to Yours Truly said, “Not only sweeping streets in front of the jewellery shops, many a times we also search for gold in the localities where jewellers live. Their family members wear heavy gold ornaments. Negligible parts of the gold polish get washed when they take bath. That flows into the nearby drains/sewers. We collect this water every day and keep extracting gold from it. We wash the dirt and filter it using white clothes. Sometimes, we boil the collected water or dirt to extract valuables. We collect gold worth Rs 2,000-6,000 a month and sell it back to the jewellers”.
“We belong to the sweeper community. It is our traditional job, which has been passed onto us by our parents. We started accompanying our elders from the age of 10 or 12 and learnt this art over the years. We don’t do anything that we shouldn’t do. All we are trying is to survive by putting in hard work. I am doing this for the past 35 years and I am comfortable in it. If we are lucky one can earn up to Rs 300-500 after a day’s toil. If lucky, we also find jewellery that a customer has lost. People ask us why we do such an obnoxious job. I tell them that our present and future lies in the dirt.” added Muniraju.
Muniraju and his family members start their sweeping work well before the municipal corporation workers turn up. To all intents and purposes, Muniraju looks like an old man eking out a living by keeping the stretch of the street clean. Muniraju has been doing this job for over four decades and the income has helped him raise three children, who are now employed in factories and restaurants.
M V Shet, owner of a wholesale jewellery shop said: “Wastage of gold and silver is inevitable while manufacturing jewellery. We melt it and then put it in a frame to give it a particular shape. Later, it’s cutting and carving is done. The process is so complicated that very small particles, invisible when seen with naked eyes, fall on the floor. We cannot get this lost portion back as we don’t have people and time to sweep streets. The loss is also inevitable during polishing of gold. When jewellers sweep their shops, waste gold and silver particles are thrown into the streets or adjacent sewer. We don’t object to their activities because ultimately they daily clean the streets and drains”.
“After the sweepers sell the dust to us, we wash it and mix it with mercury, which helps us to separate metals from the dust. This metal dust is further washed with nitric acid, which melts other metals, but keeps gold and silver intact. The fine gold dust that we get after the nitric acid wash is melted in a furnace for around 10 hours until the temperature reaches 1,000 degrees Celsius. The molten metal is cooled and turned into a plate of raw gold. First we get the raw gold tested in the lab. The grade is digitally measured. On an average, wholesale buyers have to refine as much as 2-3 kg of dust to get 10-15 g of gold. Though rarely, we do lose small nuggets of gold or smaller loose parts of jewellery in the basin at times while washing it with chemicals. These sweepers who clean the drainage often find these lost nuggets. It’s like a jackpot for them.” added Shet.
In recent times, price of no other thing has inflated as much as that of precious metals. Such has been the price escalation that one almost tends to forget that gold used to cost about Rs 6,500 per 10 grams in 2000. At present, the price of gold has reached astronomical heights and those in gold, silver and jewellery business are leaving no stone un-turned to cash in on the yellow metal’s appreciated price structure. Many people across India deal in gold dust, which is proving to be a good business under the circumstances.
