From the Archives: Anthropologists are studying the global supply of human hair—a billion dollar industry for wigs, weaves, toupees, and more—that relies on hair pickers who gather discarded strands from streets and drains to make ends meet.
Every evening, for two to three hours, people from the Waddar community gather in a corner of the Ganganagar marketplace in the city of Nagpur in central India. The area is severely impoverished; dwellings are assembled with bamboo sticks and tarpaulin sheets.
Families collecting comb waste in Nagpur and elsewhere in India have a hand-to-mouth existence with their meager earnings. Little do they know that the hair they sell takes on another life once it passes out of their hands, potentially gaining immense value as it travels the supply chain.As many consumers can attest, buying a hair piece—whether wigs, weaves, extensions, or toupees—can be an expensive prospect. But few people know the sources for these products.
Globally, the industry is worth more than a billion dollars , and India is the second-largest exporter of human hair after Hong Kong, according to Statista. The majority of India’s export is waste hair, like the strands traded in Ganganagar. Both men and women give up their hair, but many coveted strands come from the heads of rural Indian women who oil their hair and grow it long, a symbol of femininity and beauty in their circles.
In marked contrast to the careful tonsuring of devotees at Tirumala’s temples, waste hair picking and collection is not a tidy business. For example, in Northern Indian cities such as Varanasi, Assa Doron, a professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at the Australian National University, has documented how young boys—Muslim migrants from an impoverished area—gather discarded hair from the roads and gutters in the city.
The Waddars and Vedhwa Waghris travel into low-income areas and exchange goods, such as cheap utensils, toys, or sweetmeats, for the hair that individuals and families save up. To avoid police harassment, they trade in unguarded areas such as large tenement buildings and self-made encampments. Other forms of waste collecting and selling exist in India—notably millions of ragpickers who search refuse for leftover foods, glass, plastic, metal, and clothes that they can trade. Hair pickers, like ragpickers, are service nomads and make a significant contribution to the recycling industry, Bapat notes.
To explain this system’s inequity, anthropologists who have studied the hair trade note that the waste pickers’ role is hidden in many ways. One of the reasons for this obscurity “is the highly dispersed trade and the informal nature of their job,” Doron explains. Many intermediaries run unregistered enterprises in the informal sector of India’s economy. Bapat found that hair pickers and collectors are wary of discussing their work. “Owing to cheaply available labor, the comb waste collectors knew they were replaceable, so giving out their trade secrets and sources to anyone outside the community would have cost them their jobs,” she says.
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