Glitter in the gutter

At the crack of dawn, a gang of around 100 boys and young men descends on the lanes and bylanes of Bengaluru's Chickpet area. They swiftly slip into the deep, murky pits that receive the locality's sewage.
Inside, with brooms in hand, the youngsters start raking the thick, oily, grey-black sludge that shimmers in the morning light. They are looking for Element 79.
The, manholes - with covers removed and placed on the edge, on Avenue Road, Cubbonpet, Nagarthpet, Anchepet, Siddanna lane and Kilari Road - are guarded by emaciated boys who warn vehicle drivers and passers-by to look out. You could mistake them, as we did, for manual scavengers hired by civic agencies to clean the sewers. This is, in fact, underground scavenging, but with a difference.
Avenue Road - and its adjoining lanes - is a hub for goldsmiths and jewellers. There are more than 300 goldsmiths in this area who work for the city's top jewellers. The gold dust from these workshops/units often ends up in the drains, and that is the gossamer lode the young boys are purposefully hunting.
"We scour the area from early morning till around 7:30 am to collect the sludge from the gutters. We then take it to be filtered," explains Karthik who makes the most of the golden hours in the gutters before he switches to his primary job as an auto driver. Most times, however, he finds mud and nothing else, complains Karthik, who joined the tribe of treasure-hunters three years ago.
The occasional extra buck - and the hope of making it - makes the task worth their while. After all, gold hovers around Rs 23,000 per 10 gm now.
At the filtering units adjoining the railway tracks at Okalipuram, we found around 20 people, mostly women, busy silting the waste (brass often is a collateral find). They use mercury to draw out any accumulated gold. Once it is collected, the gold is sold to dealers in the same area.
M Krishnachari, who has been a goldsmith for the past 45 years, explains how the gold specks land up on roads and in drains. "When we melt gold, there's a small amount of wastage - for every 10 gm, at least 1 gm is lost. This ends up on our hands and feet. We usually rinse our hands and feet outside the store which is how the gold flows into the gutters," he says.
Vishwanatha, of Vishwanatha Antique Dye Works who specializes in embossed work, says it is difficult to estimate how much gold the boys collect on a daily basis. "It is really a question of luck. Sometimes when we send our workers to get some polishing done, they put the gold in their pockets and lose it. So these boys may get entire nuggets of gold; at other times, they have to separate the dirt from the gold powder," he says.

Collecting the muck and depositing it at Okalipuram gets the boys Rs 400 a day. "If we manage to get any gold or precious metal, we have regular buyers who pay us a little less than the market price. But it's okay for a couple of hours' job," says Santosh, a daily wager from Okalipuram.
The wiry Babu (24) doubles up as filtering staff. He says business has been hit badly of late. "The tribe (of collectors) has grown and everyone is looking in the same places, at the same time," he says. Babu earns an extra Rs 400 for labouring over mounds of sand, most of which contains human excreta, in search of the elusive micro particles.
The ramshackle filtering set-ups draw residents of the slum adjoining the railway lines. "After finishing household chores we spend time silting until sundown. We get paid Rs 250 per day for this work," says Priya, who lives nearby.
Isn't it revolting to search for gold amid human excreta? "Saar, are people who live above these gutters as decent as they look? They do worse jobs than this to lead a luxurious life," Santosh retorts. He then quietly shuts the lid of the manhole and walks away with a bag full of silt and muck, hoping he has struck gold.
- Courtesy Bangalore Mirror