A few shops further down, inside a small room filled with all sorts of old electrical appliance parts and other metal scraps is the shop of Mohd Maqsood, another scrap dealer. He too has been running his business for the last 26 years, ever since he settled here from Kolkata, as he heard from his friends that this area was a gold mine for kabadis. He echoes the same sentiments as Akhlaq. “You ask any trader here—everyone will say how they have been adversely affected by the triple blow of demonetisation, GST and the shutdown of factories. My income has almost halved, but my expenditure has increased. Be it the electricity bill or the water bill, everything has increased. Plus, I also have to pay the scrap collectors.”