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“If
you really want to punish people who don’t segregate garbage and
create more and more garbage, don’t fine them. Just send them to
the heart of the Deonar dumping grounds and make them spend at
least four hours there,” said an exasperated Jyoti Mhapsekar,
coordinating the Stree Mukti Sanghatana’s ‘Parisar Vikas’,
an innovative programme for women rag pickers.
Indeed, a visit to the Deonar landfill site is like being trapped
in an inferno even Dante would have been hard put to describe:
mounds and mounds of rotting garbage, an overpowering stench,
smoke from burning trash, glass and metal the only things that
glisten through the smouldering haze… and there’s no escape.
Mumbai generates something like 6,000 tonnes of garbage daily and
all the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) can do is collect
the stuff and dump it in dumping grounds. The Mulund and Chincholi
landfills are dumped to capacity and the Deonar ground has
scarcely any place left for the lorries that try to make their way
in anyway.
Parisar Vikas started almost by accident when Jyoti and Sharda
Sathe and other activists of the 29-year-old women’s
organisation Stree Mukti Sanghatana began working with women
ragpickers. Stree Mukti Sanghatana was famous for its play on the
girl-child, Mulghi Zhali Ho! (“A girl is born!”) and
its work with women in distress and more recently, with
adolescents. When the organisation began maintaining a crèche for
women ragpickers in Shramjeevi Nagar in 1994-’95, it realised
that it needed to organise them into associations.
At first the idea was to better the lives of the women, impart a
sense of dignity to them, see that they were empowered to counter
exploitation at the hands of middlemen who bought the recyclable
waste from them and, at some stage, give them alternatives to rag
picking. But this was easier said than done, and slowly their work
crystallised into organising and training the women into waste
management.
Parisar Vikas was launched in 1998 with just 30 women, but now has
over 2,000 women members. Designated as ‘trained parisar
bhagini’ (TPB), the women are given identity cards and every
effort is made to instil into them the three Es of Parisar Vikas:
economy, environment and empowerment. Today, there are at least
140 self-help micro-credit groups with ten members each to manage
their finances.
The women obtain training in biocomposting, vermiculture and
gardening. They handle segregated ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ waste,
putting the former into specially created composting pits and
selling ‘dry’ waste at the right price. Sushila Mokal, a
Parisar Vikas supervisor, explains the process: “First, we go
from house to house and collect the segregated garbage. We
encourage people to put their wet kitchen waste into these
‘magic’ buckets and explain to them that the resultant compost
can be used as organic compost for their plants. We monitor the
process and step in if there is any problem, especially foul
smells. For this, we provide a ‘magic’ powder that helps
remove the odours.”
The women are trained in distinguishing biodegradable waste as
‘wet’ garbage, including vegetable peels, coconut shells, even
hair, nail clippings, used cotton and paper. The ‘dry’ waste
includes plastics, metal, glass, battery cells, cloth, rubber,
bulbs, etc. Parisar Vikas has a three-tier approach to treating
garbage: the household bucket; the lane-wise collection and
composting work and the ward-wise treatment. All with one
objective: that no garbage must make its way to a dumping ground.
The women are adept at maintaining compost pits and monitoring the
odour of decomposing garbage. “We found that this was a major
deterrent for people – nobody liked the smell and were reluctant
to have pits constructed in their buildings. So we need to be
ever-present to see that the waste is turned over, spread out and
that we sprinkle the right amount of our ‘magic powder’ (a
mixture of stone and lime) to aid the process of decomposition.
The resultant organic compost is then used for plants in the
building society itself.”
Tahera Sheikh, who worked in a dumping ground but is now a parisar
bhagini at the Basera Housing Society in Chembur, is paid Rs
1,000 for four hours of work and is full of satisfaction at the
work she is now doing. The housing society, which was among the
first in Mumbai to adopt the scheme, comprises 30 flats in two
buildings. Apart from the work of 22 women in the 1,200 houses at
the Bhandup Navy colony, the BMC colony in Worli and in the Deonar
dumping ground itself, Parisar Vikas work is most visible in the
Tata Housing colony at Chembur. There, at least 20 women work in
creating 13 composting pits to take care of ‘wet’ garbage from
around 540 households and at least one tonne of dry leaves from
the scores of trees in the sprawling colony.
The Parisar Vikas compost is sold under the brand name Mrinmayee
at the rate of Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500 per tonne to buyers from farms
and plant nurseries.
Creating ‘zero garbage’ situations is not merely a dream for
activists from Parisar Vikas and Stree Mukti Sanghatana. It has
become a reality in 40 pockets of Mumbai and has now spread to
Navi Mumbai and Kalyan. Already, said Jyoti, the parisar
bhagini are successfully collecting and converting 20 tonnes
of garbage in Kalyan and around 15 to 16 tonnes in Mumbai, into
compost. In cooperation with the BMC, the organisation is
constructing and maintaining two Nisarguruna plants, with BARC
technology, for processing five tonnes of wet waste per day.
Yes, it does seem like a drop in the ocean and there are immense,
almost insurmountable, obstacles in their path. Why is it so
difficult to motivate people to do something so simple? Jyoti is
understandably bitter about the lack of people’s involvement and
the inability to get more support from the civic administration (see
accompanying interview). But it is the former that really
rankles.
“When we started work, we told people to segregate wet and dry
garbage, we found that watchmen and sweepers would take away the
dry garbage, selling it for a profit. The women got nothing in
their hands. So now, we have decided to work in areas were we can
get an entire lane and where building societies are willing to pay
Rs 10 per flat for the salaries of the women,” Jyoti said.
“We need at least three pits for ‘wet’ waste generated by
around 100 families,” she continued. Each costs Rs 4,000, but
since the pits are permanent, this is really a one-time cost. The
pits are expensive mainly because of the iron grill covers they
need. While the garbage must be exposed to the air, the covers
must be removable to enable periodic shifting of the garbage.
But if the costs are high, sponsors can step in, as in the case of
Sagarika Cassettes that sponsored work in DK Sandu Marg, proudly
proclaimed as a ‘zero garbage’ zone. Now, the municipal
corporators have been allowed to use their funds to pay for
construction of pits and for grills too, Jyoti said.
Another offshoot was the amount of methane gas generated by the
process of decomposition, which has now resulted in the
construction of a biogas plant at the BARC colony at Chembur,
where Parisar Vikas also works. The biogas plant feeds gas into
the kitchens of the international training hostel of the BARC.
Apart from heating water, attempts are being made to generate
electricity from the plant. Biogas serves a dual purpose of
bio-composting and creating manure, and providing fuel. It
completely fits in with the environmental motto: reduce, recycle,
renew!
What is really needed is greater sensitivity from everyone to the
waste they generate and dispose of. For instance, despite
protective gear like goggles, aprons and gloves, the parisar
bhagini suffer injuries from careless households that fail to
segregate garbage properly – glass pieces and razor blades crop
up even in ‘wet’ waste.
For society as a whole, it is the disposal of ‘dry’ waste that
truly poses a challenge: small plastic pouches selling anything
from shampoo sachets to gutka take years to decompose;
sanitary pads dot the depressing landscape at the Deonar dumping
ground (actually, the cotton in the pads can decompose into
compost but who removes the plastic from pads anymore?); the
enormous amount of dangerous medical waste is a separate issue
altogether.
Only 15 per cent of medical waste is toxic, the rest can be
autoclaved or hydroclaved and reused, Jyoti said. Also, the fear
of AIDS has spawned huge numbers of ‘disposable’ needles,
syringes, tubes and the like, but with no thought about their
actual disposal. Incinerators are not an environmentally sound
option and the world over, people are seeking other options, she
said.
Traditionally, ragpicking is a caste and even gender-based
occupation. Drawing both members of Dalit and of migrant
communities into its fold, the majority of its women are single
parents, either widowed or deserted. Poverty dogs them and at
least 98 per cent of ragpickers are illiterate. The ragpicker
population includes both children (five per cent) and men (10 per
cent); ragpickers range from seven years of age to 70.
But for members of Stree Mukti Sanghatana, the satisfaction is in
breaking caste taboos and in empowering women. Now, said Jyoti
proudly, our women do not see themselves at the bottom of society.
They are a vital and important part of all our lives and are
training to take on other occupations too, including nursery
training, gardeners and community leaders.
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