Little old ladies are Asia's powerful economic secret

Every morning for the past year, my mobile rubbish bin has met me at the station. She is an aged crone with a bright smile who takes old newspapers and empty plastic bottles from commuters with a barked "T'ank you."

I hasten to add that I am not intending to be insulting by calling her a "mobile rubbish bin" (although I reserve the right to be rude with that phrase if I use it for anyone else). On the contrary, this dedicated collector of trash is one of the most admirable people I know.

She has surely been in the recycling business for longer than I've been alive or Mick Jagger has been seeking satisfaction.

Despite the fact that she and her fellow collectors appear to be between 200 and 300 years old, they are gorgeous in the way only feisty old ladies can be.

It's one of those situations that is so perfect it almost makes you believe in evolution.

These ladies live off precisely the two things that commuters need to get rid of: used newspapers and empty plastic bottles. Now If only we could get them interested in discarded investment bankers, we could really clean up this planet!

Anyway, the women accumulate trash in oversized plastic bags and drag them to a recycling plant to earn a few bucks. This is Asian magic at its finest.

In every country you find people who turn trash into cash. The resourcefulness of the Asian poor powers the region's miraculous economic growth. But not for long. On Monday last week, I came out of the station to find that she and her friends were being harassed.

A bulky, uniformed woman emblazoned with the logo of the Mass Transit Railway Corporation was ordering them away, accusing them of getting in the way of station users and disrupting pedestrian traffic.

In fact, the corridors are wide, and the women had been standing against a wall, causing little interference to commuters. The old ladies backed out of the building and ended up standing on a narrow, packed walkway which links the station to the rest of the city.

And that is where they have been trying to stand for the past few days.

The old dears now have great trouble doing their recycling work, because they are buffeted by a solid mass of humanity which rolls like a black-haired lava flow across the walkway every morning. On the day of writing this column, I tried to hand one of them a paper, but I couldn't reach her through the throng. I was carried 100 meters in the wrong direction and the paper ended up on the floor.

What railway officials have done is to create a human traffic jam which disrupts pedestrian traffic while claiming to do the opposite. And by preventing recycling, they are directly causing the end of the world.

I thought about storming over to the MTRC headquarters and pointing this out, but I could imagine the officials' reply: "Our brief is to maximize shareholder value. The end of the world is a regrettable side-effect."

One day, I'll erect a statue to the real heroes of the Asian economic miracle. Not Asia's leaders, but a tiny, stooped, 200-year-old lady dragging cardboard boxes down the middle of the road. You'll know who I mean.

By Nury Vittachi