The world of Mohammad Khokun Hamid has rarely been much bigger than 10 square kilometres. The resident of a cramped room in a slum that has arisen on cemetery land near the famous Hazrat Nizamuddin shrine in South Delhi, Mr Hamid is one of thousands of rag pickers and waste collectors in the Indian capital.
When the 39-year-old father of two makes his rounds along Pandara Road, near the India Gate, one of his tasks is to collect electronic waste -- everything from batteries to mobile phones and computers -- from residents. He then hands it over to Chintan, a local environmental group, which forwards it to places where the e-waste can be safely recycled.
The work is neither glamorous nor lucrative, and Mr Hamid has hardly ever stepped out of Delhi. The farthest he goes is to Narela, a town on the outskirts of North Delhi where his mother and two brothers live.
But last week Mr Hamid was in Paris at the world climate talks, where Chintan and Safai Sena (Cleaning Army), two groups that work to recycle e-waste in Delhi, were being honoured along with 16 other groups from around the world for their green efforts.
One of the 2,000 Safai Sena men trained in the collection of e-waste by Chintan, Mr Hamid was chosen to accept the award for Chintan as part of the Momentum of Change initiative by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UN organisation described the Chintan programme, "E-waste: From Toxic to Green", as a game-changing approach to dealing with a serious problem.
In notoriously polluted New Delhi, a lot of electronic waste is burned, leading to highly toxic emissions. Chintan has campaigned to reduce such harmful practices and also create green livelihoods for urban waste-pickers in partnership with Safai Sena.
As Mr Hamid prepared recently for his once-in-a-lifetime journey, he had more mundane matters in mind than saving the planet.
Khokun Hamid, his wife Ayesha (second from right), daughter Nazma and son Alamin live in a single room in a slum in South Delhi.
"Today I'll buy winter clothes for my visit to Paris. I'm told it will be very cold there," he told a visitor, unfolding his passport to display the visa stamp of French Embassy and a blue paper that stipulated the conditions for the visit. He was in the French capital from Dec 7-10 and returned to Delhi on the day the 12-day long climate talks ended.
While in Paris, Mr Hamid was hoping to buy winter apparel and a mobile phone for his daughter Nazma Khatun and a watch for his son Alamin, students of class 10 and 7 respectively in a government school. But he wasn't sure whether he would have the money for it.
"My wife Ayesha and I earn about 15,000 rupees per month (equivalent to 8,070 baht) including tips from our employers and patrons," he said. His wife works in three houses as a maid.
"We pay about 4,000 rupees for rent and the rest is exhausted in buying rations, vegetables and other household expenses. We have no savings," he said with regret, posing with Ayesha and two children in their tiny tenement.
Mr Hamid started working as a rag picker and waste collector when he was still a teenager. He joined Chintan about 14 years ago and has been trained in how to collect waste from households and separate non-biodegradable waste.
Mohammad Khokun Hamid, e-waste collector anmd recipient of UN Climate Solutions Award
He says the work often makes him sick and he ends up spending part of his income on buying medicines.
He loads solid and liquid waste into small garbage trucks of the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and stores the e-waste in a sack. A Chintan vehicle collects the e-waste from him later.
Chitra Mukherjee, manager for Advocacy and Outreach in Chintan, says recycling e-waste from landfills reduces methane emissions, which are 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
She puts the amount of e-waste collected by Chintan in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) at 25 tonnes since 2011 when the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) appointed it as one of about a dozen groups authorised to collect e-waste in the NCR.
According to a UN report, India is the world's fifth largest producer of electronic waste and generated about 1.7 million tonnes of such materials in 2014. Over 95% of the e-waste generated in the country is either burned or dumped in landfills. With rapid urbanisation, the production of e-waste is expected to multiply in the coming years.
The UN report says that managing waste, ensuring sustainable consumption and a healthy environment, and ensuring just and safe working conditions for waste pickers are urgent challenges.
Waste collector Mohammad Khokun Hamid makes his rounds in the neighbourhood near his home in South Delhi.
"Formal recyclers do not take in electronic waste unless it is more than three tonnes," said Ms Chitra. "We train [the waste pickers], aggregate the waste, store it and when it is over three tonnes, we sell it to recyclers.
"We create this formal chain. ... Over the past four years, we have diverted 25 tonnes of electronic waste for recycling instead of going straight into the landfills."
The UNFCCC feels the Chintan initiative can serve as a model to help countries such as Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh and Ghana, which also produce a lot of e-waste and are also served by thousands of waste pickers. It says the project is highly replicable due to its low cost.
Bharati Chaturvedi, the founder of Chintan, says 3% of all greenhouse gases (GHGs) are generated due to solid waste. She calls her e-waste project an indigenous solution.
In its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted to the UNFCCC in October, India set a goal of reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 20-25% over 2005 levels, by 2020. It said it had already decreased the intensity by 12% between 2005 and 2010.
New Delhi hopes to control emissions through an emphasis on production of clean energy, developing climate-resilient urban centres, promoting e-waste to wealth conversion, forestation and abatement of pollution.
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