Union helps ragpickers build lives

Pune: Life insurance and identity cards are not things that one associates with ragpickers in India. But that`s exactly what a union in this city in Maharashtra is providing to its members who collect scrap.Called the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP), the trade union has around 7,500 members, making it one of the biggest ragpickers` unions in India. It has also devised better ways of scrap collection. Mangal Gaikwad, a ragpicker by profession, can`t stop talking about the benefits of joining KKPKP. "As a child I would envy the children who went to school with their bags and water bottles while I had to go waste-picking," she recollects. "Today I earn Rs. 3,000 from doorstep collection and the sale of scrap. Residents who used to frown at me while I was at the garbage bin now know my name and greet me. One of them even gave me a second-hand bicycle, which I now ride to work," Mangal told. In India, thousands of tonnes of garbage are segregated across the country every day with re-usable material finding its way to scrap markets . And behind this mammoth process are ragpickers, who go about their work without realising how much they contribute to the environment. But unlike other ragpickers, KKPKP is changing the lives of its members. Mangal has life insurance cover thanks to KKPKP. Her work- hours have also gone down due to which she manages to attend literacy classes. "I am now literate," she beamed. KKPKP has a credit union whereby members deposit Rs 100 per month that comes back to them as retirement benefits. The ragpickers can also avail themselves of loans from the union. KKPKP was registered as a cooperative more than 10 years ago and is now recognised nationally and internationally. Mangal is treasurer of the credit cooperative and the representative for her slum. She recently bought a bigger house for Rs 65,000 from her savings and a loan from the credit cooperative. The union has now come up with a programme to handle the city`s waste better and at lesser costs. According to Purnima Chikarmane, a KKPKP activist, Pune generates 1,500 tonnes of garbage every day. Out of this, 900 tonnes is collected by Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) trucks and taken to landfill sites. In this process, the civic body spends Rs 1,500 per tonne of garbage. The plan proposed by KKPKP called `Swach` aims at providing a waste collector at every house at a monthly cost of Rs 10 per family. The waste collector will segregate the garbage at the doorstep itself, thus leaving hardly anything for landfill sites. Though PMC liked the idea last year, it revoked the programme in September. Laxmi Narayan, another KKPKP activist, alleges that the body wanted the marginal Rs 10 fee also to come to it and hence scrapped the programme. But this hasn`t stopped the union from going ahead with its plans. It hopes to implement Swach as a cooperative through funding from corporate houses. And in five years, it envisages the cooperative as a self-sufficient body, which would outsource the work to smaller groups. Bureau Report