The other India: India's booming economy has created a huge middle class, but hundreds of millions of people still we in desperate poverty.

• Author: Gentleman, Amelia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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After a bad day at work, Manorama Begum can hardly keep from vomiting. After a good day, she merely puts off eating for a few hours, until the stench has left her nostrils and her fingernails have been scrubbed clean.

Begum, 35, is a garbage collector in New Delhi, India's capital. She is one of 300,000 workers who perform a vital role for the city: rifling through the refuse of modem life, recycling anything of worth, and carefully disposing of the rest.

Their way of life exemplifies 21st-century India's stark economic contrasts. A great deal of attention has been focused, and rightly so, on India's economic boom in recent years: India's economy has grown by 6 percent annually since 1991--a rate exceeded only by China--and investments from companies like Microsoft, General Electric, and Motorola have fueled the growth of an enormous middle class.

Nevertheless, the majority of Indians live on about 50 cents a day. While the economic boom has generated hundreds of thousands of jobs in the technology and service industries, only 10 percent of India's 1.1 billion people have such jobs. Most Indians don't work in offices, but instead lay bricks, harvest crops, or pick up garbage.

More than 95 percent of New Delhi has no formal system of house-to-house garbage collection, so it falls to the city's ragpickers, one of India's poorest and most marginalized groups, to provide this basic service. They are not paid by the government, relying instead on donations from the communities they serve and on meager profits from the sale of discarded items.

Now, after centuries of submissive silence, the waste collectors are beginning to demand respect. In October, the Delhi state government made a small but significant concession. In response to pressure from a ragpickers' union, it supplied about 6,000 workers with protective gloves, boots, and aprons. This is the first time the government has made any effort to recognize this band of essential workers.

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"Looking after rubbish, anywhere in the world, is not dignified," says J. K. Dadoo, the Secretary of Delhi's Environment Ministry. "The very fact that we have acknowledged that we need to look after their health is a tremendous acknowledgment of their dignity."

The waste collectors are underwhelmed. They do not want gloves, they say. They want a salary, health care, uniforms that they hope will discourage police harassment, education for their children, and...