Channeling Cloth As A Resource For The Poor: The Goonj Crusade

 

CHANNELING CLOTH AS A RESOURCE FOR THE POOR: THE GOONJ CRUSADE By ANSHU GUPTA 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee th

Presented at the 57  Ramon Magsaysay Awards Lecture Series 28 August 2015, Manila, Philippines

Thank you for taking out the time to listen to the story of our journey and the journey of Cloth. Like most journey’s that don’t have a regular  path, our journey has been defined by the questions that bothered us. But  before I go into what these questions are, let me share a little bit about myself and what brought us to these questions. I come from a middle class family of India, the kind which manages with little but puts a big premium on respect and dignity. I did my schooling from various places as my father was in a transferable job. I studied mass communication and economics and moved to freelance writing, photography and then to corporate communication jobs. I have often been asked why I decided to give up a corporate job and start a voluntary organization when I was only 28 years old. Today startups may be a buzz word in the world, but sixteen years ago it wasn’t even  even   common lingo. So I was asked, why do an impractical thing like starting a voluntary organization? The fact is you don’t do something to start something, it happens because something bothers you, disturbs you.

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When I look back, I guess my need to figure out and define my life really instigated the idea. I had to decide whether I was going to take the  path the rest of my family, friends and everyone else around me had taken, or will I do things differently? It’s not as grand or heroic as it sounds. It started with the day to day things — the the beggar who came next to my car on the red light or the badly littered roads crowded with homeless people. Each of us sees the world with his or her own  perspective. You may see violence when you step out, but another  person may see hunger. It’s a question of what bothers you. For me, cloth bothered me a lot. I think it had something to do with a chance meeting with Habib while I was studying journalism. Many years ago, during the initial phase of my journalism days, one winter wint er morning in old Delhi I read a line in Hindi “ LAWARIS LAAASH  DHONE WALA” (meaning WALA” (meaning picker of abandoned dead bodies ) written on the back of a rickshaw. A bit shocked and intrigued I followed the rickshaw. That’s how I met and spent a lot of time with the rickshaw owner Habib and his blind wife Aamna begum, to understand his strange  profession. Habib picked up abandoned dead bodies of homeless people who were usually migrants from other states. He was paid 2 meters of cloth and 20 rupees per dead body. While talking to Habib and going with him to see the entire process, two statements from him and his little daughter shook me completely. Habib said: “In winters my work goes up.” During winter season, Habib would pick up ten to twelve dead  bodies in athis twenty four hour period ofindead a periphery fivepick to six kilometers, was double the number bodies he of would up in summer. If you kept all other reasons the same, there were more deaths on the roads simply due to cold weather. Habib’s daughter, who was approximately five years old at that time very innocently told me: “When I feel cold, I hug the dead body and sleep. It does not trouble me, it does not turn around!”  around!”  This was happening in a major city where  people have so much stuff in their cupboards and they don’t know who to give it to. My question was simple: Winter is not like earthquake   Copyright © 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation

 

where the shake kills people or floods where excess water kills people! If the cold killed people then I should have also died since I live in the same city. I survived because I have proper clothes and the person on the road died because he doesn’t have anything to cover himself. So it’s not cold, it’s lack of clothing which kills people.  people.  While looking deeply at cloth and what it meant for village India some fundamental questions came up. Like when we talk of basic needs, we say food, cloth and shelter, then why is it that in the list of development subjects, which has more than 100 -150 issues; from domestic violence to global warming, clothing is not listed as a subject? Why do we think of clothes during disasters only? Why is this basic need of the entire humankind treated as disaster relief material? Why is it that women’s need for proper sanitary pads not an issue? Why do we treat cloth as a mere charitable object to donate? Why is it that while the urban world talks of flyovers and skyscrapers, rural India struggles with the basics things like malnutrition, healthcare, and education? We all know that cloth is synonymous to the dignity of a person. We in the cities identify the social, cultural and financial standing of a person mostly by how he or she is dressed. In the villages cloth plays a much  bigger role. For a village kid, a school uniform is not just an extra dress  but also the first symbol of learning. But is the holistic development of humankind possible when basic needs like clothing remains unfulfilled for many? Can we really ensure safe motherhood for a woman who doesn’t have access to proper sanitary pads? These are the needles, in the times of machines that bother us. We all go to the malls in cities to buy clothes and other stuff. Oftentimes we buy things because of want. The homes we live in are shrinking as the world becomes a more crowded place. The truth is people need to discard frequently to buy more things. The end result is that discarded cloth and other material end up as waste and a burden on the cities. This

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is one of the problems that the world is facing right now. A large  population in the villages and slums struggle for the basics, the same material and opportunities you and I take for granted. At Goonj, we take the underutilized discard of urban India and turn it into a powerful resource for the needy. In the lastthis sixteen years,from GOONJ has built a network of pipelines, channelising material the cities to the villages. When we started, we questioned some basics, giving old cloth as charity is an age old tradition in India and other countries. But cloth is also about a person’s dignity. When I give cloth as charity, does it rob the recipient of his dignity and self-respect in the  process? A more personal question is: Can I call myself a donor when I give away my discard? Isn’t the receiver doing me a favor  by extending the life of something I spent my hard earned money on? When we decided to go to the villages, do we know enough about the problems and solutions of the local communities, in a country as diverse as India? We have been constantly learning from the villagers we work with and the common people we encounter. Let me first share what this ‘giving’ is doing for urban India. Throughout the years we work with the urban masses, highlighting how their underutilized material is invaluable for the villages. Material is collected through regular campaigns by volunteers, residential and export associations, corporates, exporters, retails chains, and others. The giving of their discard for a worthwhile cause gently nudges people to get personally involved in addressing social issues. When an urban housewife or a corporate professional organizes a Goonj awareness cum collection camp in her colony or office, the ownership percolates right down to the last individual. In effect we are slowly embedding a culture and mechanism of sustained giving for vast stocks of everyday necessities lying as idle surplus in urban homes.

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When the collected material reaches us, it goes through a rigorous  process which includes sorting, packing, value adding, etc. This is based on need, culture, and geographical requirements of the different regions at our processing centers across India. This helps us in matching the material with the needs of rural communities. And our network of over 250 partner grassroots organizations includes NGO’s, N GO’s, village  panchayats, Ashoka fellows, Indian army, social activists, and others  become our eyes and ears on the ground. They act as our hands in the last mile delivery of our initiatives and material. Together with them we organize village meetings to discuss the needs and problems of villages. In the villages, the material works on two levels, for an individual we try to match the material as closely as possible to their needs like woolen clothes for winters, school dress for children or sanitary pads for women. We give family kits to address the needs of an average family but these kits are not given as charity to people. We feel that people in the villages should get this material, with their dignity intact, and not as beggars. That’s why we evolved the the Cloth for Work initiative. For us, the material is our tool while the village communities identify their own issues or pain points. They work on their unaddressed community issues and get the material as a reward for their labor. In the remote villages of Assam, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and many other states; roads have been repaired, wells have been dug up, bamboo bridges have been made and water bodies cleaned. All this was done without any financial transaction. On an average we are initiating more than 1,000 such activities every year across India. Similarly under our Not Just a Piece of Cloth (NJPC) initiative we are using MY Pads, the clean cloth sanitary napkins made from last shreds of cotton cloth, as a tool to make women aware of the massive social taboos and the culture of shame and silence around menstruation. The reality is that countless women use dirty rags, sand, ash, jute bags, and other inappropriate materials as sanitary pads.

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There is a woman who used a piece of blouse and died due to tetanus  because of the hook inside. This humble piece of cloth is instigating women to speak up about their hardships, the indignity and the huge health risk they face in those five to six days. We make MY Pads, a simple but clean cloth pad and use them as a tool to open up the subject in village meetings and city colleges to get more men and women to talk about menstruation as a normal thing. Thus what is considered a waste in the cities is proving to be a powerful tool for social change, a huge resource for rural and slum development and a valuable asset for income generation. In the larger scheme of things, giving of basic need material reduces the cash expenditure for low-income households, freeing up their meager resources for other urgent needs like food, shelter, and health. This in effect expands their spending power. When the last shred of non-wearable city waste is used to generate employment by making products, thousands of kilograms of waste material is saved from the landfills. Thus without making any  policy level changes an economic bridge is being built between two extreme ends of India by sharing the surplus of one’s prosperity to address the lack of resources of another. It is in fact turning out to be the genesis of a parallel economy that is trash based not cash based. At every step of the way collaborations have made this possible. It is the  people in the cities and villages who make our entire operation sustainable, transparent, giving every stakeholder a chance to serve, without much financial burden. I often say that our stories are very emotional but our work is hard core logistics and if you only see one part and not the other. You will never get the whole idea if you do not see the whole picture. GOONJ started with sixty-seven personal clothes, today touching 2,000 tonnes of material, with frequent disasters every year. We have eleven offices with a team of more than 300 people and thousands of volunteers in India and abroad. While over 3 million sanitary pads have already been produced

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and reached out to women in villages across India in the last decade, over half a million kilograms of rags have been turned into a tool for income generation by creating mattress/blankets(Sujnis) which provides work to hundreds of families. f amilies. That youofa money glimpseweinto the on operational part ofhas ourresulted day to in daya work.gives Instead stress services which wide network of transporters, suppliers and other agencies that provide free or highly subsidized services. In the villages, our existing network of partner organizations is the backbone of our model. But in one word if I had to describe our work, I would say we work on changing mind sets. Throughout the year, in the cities we actually try to embed in the urban masses an attitude of continuous giving, born from empathy for village India’s issues and challenges. In the villages as we work closely with our partner grassroots organisations, the material helps bring them closer to their communities and address areas where they feel financially constrained otherwise. For the rural masses, the idea that they themselves have a lot of wisdom and empowerment to deal with many of their own problems is the change in perspective we look for. On a systemic level, we hope we have firmly established old material (thought fit only for charity earlier) as a development resource as  powerful as money. In the development sector, we hope we have  brought into the agenda some basic but ignored needs and issues like clothing, yearly disasters like winters, floods or sanitary napkin for women’s health. We hope we have made them issues of concern and  brought them into the list of subjects to work work on. On an intrinsic level, the work is making people, in cities and the villages more mindful of what they have and how they can solve their own problems with their knowledge, skills and resources. What drives me personally is that in some small way, the lives of people are being   Copyright © 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation

 

vitalized as their standards of living improve with material inputs. We have seen how getting material with dignity as an earning rather than as a charity changes everything for a person. It brings about a quiet confidence on an individual level even as it is bringing together communities. Gandhi and Vinobha, two jewels of India lay a lot of value on the age old tradition of Shramdaan (voluntary labor) from the masses. I hope our work has contributed towards reviving this tradition by  bringing up a deeper altruistic attitude of helping others to help yourself. There The re can’t be a better or surer indicator of sustenance and ownership. The fact that in the process, massive urban waste is constructively utilized instead of becoming an environmental disaster is a big bonus. As an organization we can cater to a very small part of the growing demand and supply in the world and that’s why we want to spread more as an idea so that others replicate the work. We do hope that with this award, the world sees the potential of two new currencies for development —   — tthe he labor of the people who have nothing more to give and the discarded material of the cities, the one thing we all want to get rid of. We hope the world is listening… 

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