This Man Offered to Buy Me A Pepsi:

His name is Ram Kumar, and he works as a Chintan waste-recycler in Tansen Marg, near Bengali Market. I met him on Friday and shadowed his route. Midway, he parked his rickshaw in an alley and asked me with a smile: "Pepsi or Coke?"

At first, I was a little thrown back and I kept respectfully declining. I was also sick at the time, so soda wouldn't have been my natural choice of drink anyway. Yet, he kept insisting and finally bought me a Pepsi with the approximately 2000 rs (roughly US$40) that he earns in one month. As he walked towards the drink stand, I contemplated chasing after him to offer to pay for both our drinks, but I chose to stay put. I was certain I made the right choice when the elderly waste-picker came walking back beaming with pride as he handed over that bottle of soda to me. In a country where street children and women in stained saris tug on your shirt for change and food, where auto-wallas and storekeepers shamelessly try to 'fleece' or cheat you, this wastepicker spent half of his daily earnings to buy me a Pepsi. Talk about having self-dignity. Thoughts?

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P.S. After he finished his route, Ram offered to buy me tea and lunch, but this time I politely declined, said my goodbyes and thank yous, and made a move for the office. Part of it was due to my fear of drying up his savings, the other part was due to how awkward our table talk would have been given my 10-Hindi phrases vocab limit.

Two Weeks Left!

With two weeks left in Delhi, I am scrambling to finish my final report. At the beginning of the summer, I was assigned to audit Chintan’s Door to Door program, a micro-waste initiative that provides residential neighborhoods with responsible doorstep garbage collection while simultaneously providing our wastepickers with a way of earning a livelihood. Each morning from Monday to Saturday, households give their waste to the wastepicker who will segregate and sell it to the recycling trade. On top of the revenue earned by selling the recyclables, each wastepicker recieves a salary of approximately 10 rupees per door per month from Chintan. The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), a branch of the government, provides the rickshaws that are used in collection routes along with two waste bins per household. Chintan finances the uniforms, salaries of wastepickers/supervisors/manager, and maintenance of the rickshaws. The only source of revenue for Chintan in this waste initiative is the monthly fees that range from 30 rupees in middle class neighborhoods to 50 rupees in VIP neighborhoods. Since its inception, the program has been unsuccessful at generating a surplus and has been operating at a loss.

An NDMC-sponsored rickshaw is parked outside of a home as the wastepicker rings the doorbell to collect the waste.

With each additional day spent shadowing wastepickers, interviewing residents, and talking with the program’s supervisors, I became more and more aware of the inner workings and operational problems of this program.

I began most of my mornings by leaving the Vasant Kunj apartment at dusk to meet individual wastepickers at the start of their collection route. Collection routes begin anywhere from 6:00am to 10:30am. According to the reasoning of Prakash, the Door to Door program manager, waste collection for VIP neighborhoods, those which house high-level government bureaucrats, starts later as residents generally wake up later in the day. On the other hand, waste collection for middle class neighborhoods tends to start earlier as residents are generally up at dusk.

A peaceful back lane in Sarojini Nagar, a middle class neighborhood

For each of the twenty-four wastepickers that I followed, I made a map that documented the schedule and direction of their route such as the one below. Such documentation had not yet been done, a bit of a red flag for a program that is running in its sixth year. (On a side note, perhaps Delhi Transport Corporation, could learn a thing or two from this as well. DTC is one of the largest bus service operators in the world but has not yet published a comprehensive route map of their system!) The collection of maps I made for the Door to Door program will be used in the following ways: (1) to quickly track down each wastepicker if need be, (2) in publicity materials as an example of how the collections generally operate, (3) to highlight inefficiencies in the route or potential locations for service expansion (ie: a school or a hospital close to a row of homes), and (4) to facilitate in the turnover of data and information in case Prakash ever decides to leave his job, a likely occurrence given the low retention rate of staff in India’s non-profit sector.

In addition, the process of tracking the route of each wastepicker brought to light several observations about Indian neighborhoods. The homes in VIP neighborhoods are built with a main portion for household members and guests along with a back portion for the servants’ quarters. Wastepickers will either collect waste from the front door or from the servants’ quarters depending on each resident’s request. The differences between navigating through the front entrance and the back can be dramatic. The front entrance of VIP homes are accessorized with name plates, white Ambassador cars, and manicured gardens. Yet, this picturesque image dissolves with a quick circle towards the back of the home. The servants’ quarters, merely footsteps behind the front entrance, have more in common with a slum. In this land, clothes are strung across electricity posts to dry and servants squat to take bucket showers in the open. While the children of the masters play cricket in the neighborhood park, the children of the servants push around a rubber tire with a stick in the alleyway.

The conspicuous white Ambassador series car given to Indian government officials.

Along with mapping out the routes of each wastepicker, I also surveyed six households in each neighborhood for a customer satisfaction report. I quickly learned the stark differences between surveying in a VIP neighborhood and in a middle class neighborhood. Residents in VIP neighborhoods tend to have several “layers” of maids, drivers, and security personnel that have to be pierced in order to gain a direct audience with them. Needless to say, I learned to avoid surveying the gated homes with security towers (those men have guns!)—actually, I was more or less denied entry as I had “to have an appointment to speak with Madam” on several occasions. The middle class neighborhoods became a surveyor’s paradise. English-speaking residents were more likely to open their own doors rather than the Hindi-speaking servants in the VIP homes who wouldn’t understand my introductions. It was also much easier to strike up conversations with the residents of middle class colonies as many of them were likely to be found outside of their homes in the morning washing their own cars, reading the paper on the steps, or handing their waste directly to our picker. From the wastepicker’s perspective, collection is also a lot more efficient in the middle class neighborhoods as they can reach more doors in a given time.

As a surveyor, I found Sarojini Nagar, a middle class neighborhood, to be pleasantly welcoming.

Last but not least, I am currently compiling a final report complete with recommendations on how to approach the program’s core operational problems. As mentioned earlier, the program is not financially sustainable. The bulk of the program’s costs go towards the salaries of the waste pickers, the supervisors, and the manager. The only source of revenue for the NGO is the monthly collection fee that households are expected to pay. The collection of fees is not yet at 100% either. Right now, my approach will be: (1) to identify and close up any leakages in revenue, (2) to find new sources of revenue (collection fees) that we can tap into without increasing any of our current costs. An example of the second could be introducing the classrooms of a school or a dormitory of a hospital to an already existing route. That way, the waste picker would be able to benefit from additional sales of recyclables and Chintan will be able to benefit from additional collection fees without having to hire an additional wastepicker. That’s just a preliminary idea. I’ll iron out the kinks and give you an update when the product is finished.

Until then..

Michelle

"Right-to-Know Law Gives India’s Poor a Lever"

"[India] may be the world’s largest democracy, but a vast and powerful bureaucracy governs. It is an imperial edifice built on feudal foundations, and for much of independent India’s history the bureaucracy has been largely unaccountable. Citizens had few means to demand to know what their government was doing for them.

But it has now become clear that India’s 1.2 billion citizens have been newly empowered by the far-reaching law granting them the right to demand almost any information from the government. The law is backed by stiff fines for bureaucrats who withhold information, a penalty that appears to be ensuring speedy compliance."

True story. Read it here.

-Michelle