Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat: project for the empowerment of women waste-pickers

This paper reports on a project to organise a group of women whose livelihoods are based on waste-picking. The project was premised upon the fact that waste-pickers are engaged in socially useful, economically productive and environmentally beneficial work.

The project was an attempt to question the widely held belief that literacy is a desirable even necessary prerequisite for development among impoverished communities. Education was believed to be an empowering process that does not restrict itself to literacy, but one that needed to explore alternate modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ that are meaningful and relevant to the illiterate masses. Empowerment in the context of education was seen to be a process through which women learn to critically reflect upon their life situation, analyse it and experience a sense of confidence and self–worth through the building of a collective identity and then exercise the power to make, influence or control decisions that affect their lives.

The paper describes how the project objectives were to:

• form an independent association of scrap collectors
• formalise livelihoods through integration of waste-pickers into urban solid waste management through compulsory segregation of garbage at source, and its doorstep collection by waste-pickers
• assert waste-pickers rights over recyclable scrap
• eliminate child labour in scrap collection
• develop self supporting sustainable institutional mechanisms for social security for scrap collectors
• provide legislative protection for waste-pickers
• provide research and documentation to support institutional and advocacy initiatives

The study finds that:

• at present the Association has 4594 registered members, of whom about 3500 have paid membership fees and have taken the identity card, all registered members participate in mass programmes and every scrap collector in the city is aware of the existence of the Association
• the membership of the Association is drawn from specific slums across the city where large numbers of scrap collectors reside
• the endorsement of the identity cards has led to considerable reduction in harassment from the police and municipal authorities and an increase in the confidence of waste-pickers
• redressal through mobilisation includes recovery of bribes taken by the police, recovery of compensation for physical abuse and accident claims, domestic violence and desertion and other similar cases
• the formation of a Credit Co-operative has reduced the members' dependence on usurious informal channels of credit
• a store has been started with the objective, amongst other things, to ensure better returns for labour for the waste-pickers and improve the bargaining capacity of waste-pickers