'Will anyone invite a waste-picker inside their home and give him chai?'

'There is a nexus between elected officials, bureaucrats and the contract lobby and when you are working for the workers, the ragpickers, you get threats. Our strength is the 10,000 people who are with us. We have had to take the help of the court to make our lives safe.'

'Though we started with the livelihood of waste pickers we have moved to a movement that impacts the livelihood of waste pickers, society and environment.'

Social activist Nalini Sekhar has worked to improve the working conditions of the waste-pickers of Bengaluru for the last four years and describes the her work as being rife with "occupational hazards which energises her to work with more vigour".

After all, she has behind her 25 years of work in the same space in Mumbai and Pune.

Four years ago, at the age of 50, Nalini Sekhar decided to be a social entrepreneur and co-found Hasirudala, an organisation that works with the rag-pickers of the city. She admits that she herself was surprised by the decision to start Hasirudala.

Today, Hasirudala has managed to make the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike issue ID cards to over 10,000 rag-pickers in the city, thus integrating them with the city’s solid waste management system.

Now, the rag-picking 'entrepreneurs' of Hasirudala work with 12,000 households and each 'entrepreneur' earns around Rs 10,000 per month.

It all began 25 years ago in Pune where Nalini worked with the SNDP University in the field of adult education. She found that the most marginalised among the urban poor was waste-pickers who they were kept on the outskirts of even the slums where they lived.

Nalini Sekhar, image, below, who describes herself as a combination of social entrepreneur and social activist, tells Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com how she managed to integrate the marginalised into the mainstream.

Working with the waste-pickers of Pune

We were three youngsters (Poornima, Lakshmi and Nalini) from the university and one of our major achievements was to unionise the waste-pickers under the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat because they themselves did not think what they were doing was work. Even the ministry bracketed them with beggars in the social economic survey. Society also looked at them as either beggars or thieves.

When we tried to start a union for them, they were resistant; they couldn't understand why three girls from the university asked them to form a union.

First, one woman called Sumantai agreed to join and slowly, others also joined us. On the first day itself, we issued 1,100 ID cards. We never took convincing them as a challenge as we were in our early twenties; optimistic and full of energy.

After a year, I moved to the US with my family and there, I worked for the survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. I even worked with a group to push for a national level and state level legislation in California on human trafficking.

After 10 years, I came back from the US to Pune, and continued my work with the rag-pickers. Our major success was starting a national level network of rag-pickers named the Alliance of Indian Waste Pickers. We made the Maharashtra government recognise them. The main grievance of the garbage-pickers was that they were not recognised and there was a lot of harassment from the police and government officials.

Starting Hasirudala in Bengaluru

In 2010, when I came back to Bengaluru after working with rag-pickers for quite a few years, I had no plan to continue my work here. At that time, Bengaluru was changing the way solid waste management system worked. They were talking about decentralisation and all the other aspects of waste but not a word about waste-pickers.

I couldn’t remain silent; I started working with the citizens' forum and looked at what was good for the city and also for the waste-pickers.

Finally, Hasirudala, which means green force, was born. We call the waste-pickers green force because what they are doing is making the environment green.

Unorganised, unrecognised 35,000 waste-pickers 

Bengaluru is home to around 35,000 unorganised, unrecognised waste-pickers, itinerant buyers and waste sorters who make a living out of the 4,000 tonnes of solid waste produced in the city.

This informal sector is the biggest contingent of waste managers of the city.

If the government had to do this work, they would have to spend at least Rs 80 crores. So the waste-pickers are reducing the burden of the government. They are the silent environmentalists but are at the bottom of the pyramid and get paid the least for their work.

ID cards and salary for the waste-pickers

The first thing we did was to take an enumeration of the waste-pickers so that we could bring them under one umbrella and provide them with ID cards.

There are around 35,000 of them but so far we have touched only 10,000.

Because of my experience in Pune and travelling to other places in India as part of the Alliance of Indian Waste Pickers, in four years we have unified 10,000 waste-pickers. Providing them with BBMP ID cards was a major achievement as nobody harasses them now.

Okay, they have the ID cards and they are socially accepted; ‘what next’ was the question. They should have some monetary benefits from picking waste. 

We started looking for well-paying jobs for them in the private space, in the bulk waste generating space. The government does not provide waste management to anybody where there are more than 50 houses or more than 10 kilos of wet waste. It is in this private space that we decided to engage them.

The 2 bin, 1 bag concept

'2 bins, 1 bag' is a concept we came up with, which meant there is a green bag for natural waste, a red one for reject waste and one for dry waste. We serve 12,000 households and our plan is to reach one lakh households in one year.

Our waste-pickers, the majority of them women, go house to house in villas but they collect waste from a central place in the apartments.

We identify one waste-picker and make her the entrepreneur and she brings a few more workers to work under her so that work never suffers. The person who goes and collects waste from each household gets Rs 10,000 a month and also the dry waste.

From working for waste-pickers to waste management

Everyday, the waste-picker weighs the wet waste, the dry waste and the waste that goes to the landfill, from what she collects from each household. Later on, the data is sent to the household so that people reduce the rejects or the waste that goes to the landfill. We make the households pay more for the rejects so that it will make them conscious of what they are doing and also environmentally conscious.

In the beginning, each household used to produce 340 gm of rejects everyday. Today it has come down to 125 gm. This is made possible by segregating waste.   

Because the concepts worked for us, other citizens have taken it to another 65,000 households (today, five and a half lakh people in Bengaluru are segregating waste). They are using the two bin, one bag concept. It has become a movement of sorts in Bengaluru.

Within one year, if we were able to make more than five lakh people segregate waste, we can do this with one crore people.

Livelihood of waste-pickers the first priority

Though we started with the livelihood of waste-pickers we have moved to a movement that impacts the livelihood of waste-pickers, society and environment.  

Every year, we release a data that shows how much trees we have saved, how much electricity saved, how much impact we have had on livelihood of the waste pickers, etc with the help of the IT firm, Mindtree, who do this work for us, free.

Though we do waste management of the city through waste-pickers by recycling more than 650 tonnes of dry waste, deliver more than 150 tonnes of wet waste for composting every month, operate the city’s three biogas plants and provide management services to 33 dry waste collection centres in the city, our first priority will always be the livelihood of waste-pickers.

We have so far given employment to 500 people with Hasirudala as entrepreneurs. More than 300 children of waste-pickers get a scholarship from the state to study. Nearly 50 of our entrepreneurs have become mainstream, with the corporation signing MoU with them directly and not through Hasirudala.

Have waste-pickers become part of society?

If you ask whether the waste-pickers have become a part of society, the singular answer is 'NO'. It has not happened. Will anybody invite a waste-picker inside their home and give him chai? No.

But it has happened in Pune. Some of the waste-pickers tell me that where once they were not allowed inside the homes to collect waste, today even the Brahmins have started letting them inside their homes.

Over a period of 20 years of work, it has happened in Pune. It has not happened in Bengaluru yet.

In Pune, the child of a waste-picker who first went to college has become a journalist.  Another child went to London to study catering management. So many children are studying nursing, engineering, etc.

In Pune, you can say we have integrated them into the mainstream but it will take another decade to achieve that in Bengaluru.

One Hasirudala not enough. One Hasirudala cannot meet all the needs of the city; you need many more Hasirudalas. So far, we have had only individuals helping us; we need more corporates participating in this venture.

We have the office space given to us by an individual, Mindtree gives us free service in data management and the apartments we service pay us. So, we are almost self-sufficient and are able to pay salary to all the people.

Lessons learnt

The biggest lesson learnt was 'if you want to be right, you will never be popular'. When you want to stand up for the rights of people, you will not be liked, and we human beings want to be liked.

This is a big challenge for me personally as one has to introspect constantly.

Still, it has been a very satisfying and empowering journey and it energises me.