Cleaning the streets and clearing the rubbish has always been work foisted on the Dalits, but Mr Balmati is not bitter."Look, I'm illiterate For me, this is a good job," he says. But we never find anything valuable, only broken things."The Balmatis are Dalits, members of the caste that was once considered Untouchable, though Untouchability is illegal in India now. They are responsible for keeping the street clean, and seeing that the rubbish is collected It's not an official post, no one appointed them They inherited it. But they get 4,000 rupees (£50) a month from the city council, plus 100 rupees (£1.20) a month from each house on the street."If we find something good in the rubbish, we keep it," says Mr Balmati "Broken utensils, clothes, plastic products.

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Rubbish is money, and someone comes round to collect your trash for you, usually in the early hours before you've even roused yourself out of bed.Babu Choudry, the 18-year-old who collects our rubbish, comes on a cycle-cart, like a cycle-rickshaw for carrying rubbish instead of passengers. "I sort through the rubbish and separate paper, plastic, bottles, computer parts and iron," he says. "I sell those to the scrap-dealers, and only send the rest to the dump."He works for Ramkrishnan and Mamta Balmaki, but they are known universally in the neighbourhood as Auntie and Uncle.

The rag merchants like Mr Ali deal by the kilogram.The room is also stacked to the rafters with 20-foot-high piles of old manuscripts and documents, dog-eared books and pages of accounting. It is impossible to say what valuable documents may lurk among these towers that teeter over Mr Ali's head. But it does not matter, as he can sell them to the recycling plant at seven rupees (8p) a kilogram.And so I decided to follow what happens to the rubbish when it is thrown out of my house in the old Sufi suburb of Nizamuddin. In India, the rich do not have to put out their dustbins - and the rich includes Westerners. Ghazipur is the dust-heap of the Golden Dustman in Our Mutual Friend.Delhi also has the rag-and-bottle shops of Bleak House. In fact, one stands at the end of the main road outside my house, run by Riyasat Ali, a 22-year-old who has inherited the family business.

It is a small warehouse open at one end onto the street, filled with heaps of bottles, glass and plastic, and a large pair of scales to weigh it all in. Like Dickens' London, Delhi is a city of the very rich and the very poor, where the former live in grand townhouses attended by retinues of servants, and the latter scavenge outside for whatever they can find. Every few minutes or so they have to scurry out of the way as the bulldozers advance, trying to flatten the mountain.It is a scene from Dickens' London, especially in the winter when thick fogs swirl in and the poor huddle around makeshift fires along countless roadsides. The stench is almost unbearable.And at the top, the scene laid out before you is from the 19th century. Ghazipur towers several hundred feet in the air, and stretches a mile or more across It rots and oozes Trails of slime seep down the sides.