THE view from Rajat Chaurasia’s place of work is spectacular. A steaming mountain of rubbish, it rises 30 metres (about 100 feet) above the Okhla industrial district, providing a view over much of south Delhi. With rats, kites and, during the monsoon, clouds for company, Mr Chaurasia spends days and nights there, salvaging scraps of plastic and metal from the detritus of India’s capital.

He is one of around 200 ragpickers working the Okhla dump, one of India’s biggest, with around 7m tonnes of rubbish. Most of them live at the foot of the mountain, in a shanty of iron and plastic. They scavenge for about ten hours a shift—enough, says Mr Chaurasia, a 19-year-old with a decade of experience on the dump, to earn 40-100 rupees (67 cents-$1.67). It is a traditional system—the ragpickers are Dalits, members of Hinduism’s ancestral underclass—but it has helped assure India of one of the world’s highest rates of recycling: anything from 50-90% of the waste stream. Still, it is inefficient. Indian streets are filthy and landfills a health hazard. And for the ragpickers the work is wretched.

Wading through rubbish gives the pickers skin diseases and infections. Methane emitted by the dump makes them nauseous. A decade ago, people say, when the dump was more unstable than it is today, several ragpickers were buried alive. Officials from the Delhi government, which runs the dump, are a more quotidian peril, shaking the ragpickers down for five or ten rupees a time. “NGOs are always coming here and expressing concern, but this is how we earn our living,” Mr Chaurasia shrugs. “Nothing changes in India.”

It is easy to see how he would think that. Solid-waste management is the responsibility of India’s municipal governments, yet with few exceptions they discharge it execrably. The World Bank blames apathy, ignorance and a lack of money for this failure. It could add Hindu tradition and an inexhaustible supply of destitute ragpickers, 100,000 in Delhi alone.

Some fast-growing cities have attempted to clean up the mess. Ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth games in Delhi, private waste-management firms were made responsible for half the city’s dozen zones. The government also announced plans to integrate the ragpickers into the formal waste system, by giving out protective clothing and training. To ease the pressure on the capital’s three main landfill sites, including Okhla, all of which are hopelessly overfilled, the government established two composting plants and a waste-to-energy power station, able to consume around 1,900 tonnes of rubbish a day. At the time, this looked like a striking turnaround. Yet outside Delhi’s rich suburbs, where local residents’ associations have taken matters into their own hands, the city is not obviously cleaner.

Perhaps that is not surprising. Greater prosperity generates more rubbish, and in Delhi, one of India’s richest places, non-industrial waste has grown by nearly a third in a decade. It appears too much for several of the private contractors to cope with. Meanwhile, Delhi’s shortage of landfill capacity is becoming an emergency.

The city government’s efforts to secure new sites have been blighted by myriad legal challenges, from irate local residents and champions of ragpickers, to the unhelpfulness of neighbouring states. After over a decade of looking, it has secured a single site, in western Delhi. This is bad news for the capital, and India’s 7,000-odd other towns and cities are likely to fare worse. Only those in relatively well-managed Gujarat—where an outbreak of pneumonic plague in 1994 spurred a major clean-up—are getting much better.

What will turn back the muck? The usual hope is that middle-class taxpayers will, after the fashion of Delhi’s residents’ associations, demand more hygienic streets from increasingly capable governments. Yet it will take a while—not least because of India’s enormous supply of ragpickers and paucity of alternative livelihoods for them.

Wherever ragpickers have been retrained for the formal economy, says Suneel Pandey of the Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi, a horde of replacements emerge from the countryside to replace them on the dumps. Mr Pandey has first-hand experience of their tenacity. A research project he was running to measure methane emissions from the Okhla dump became a battle with ragpickers who stole the plastic pipes he sank into it. The guards Mr Pandey installed to protect the pipes were stabbed. Peace of sorts broke out only after one of his boreholes caught fire—allowing guards and ragpickers alike to boil their tea over it. If India’s informal sector is unproductive, it is also ingenious.