ABSTRACT
Gradually they form a community, not out of any mainstream sense of kinship, but united in the neighbourhood proximity and their shared, illegal profession. Perceptions of kinship and neighbourhood strongly inform the people research into the marginalisation of the waste pickers of Calcutta, and the author describes to Putnam's theories of bridging-bonding and the related areas of social and human capital for context. With being so, the people focus is primarily on the role of the women in the settlements how they live their lives without male figures and the impact those has on them, their children, the neighbourhood and wider society. Increasingly, they are doing the alone when their men do either abandon them or spend significant amounts of time in their leisure pursuits. Beyond the realms of their waste picking work, family life and perspective tends to be very narrow.
