The action movie called field visits

Parag Gupta
Founder, Waste Ventures

This is a post by Silpa Kaza, one of the Summer Fellows working with us this year. For an introduction of her and the other fellows – check out our company blog.

The first field visit to Osmanabad, Maharashtra with Dr. Sanjay Gupta from Waste Ventures left me sitting at the edge of my seat as we went from one location to another, finding and fighting corruption. Sanjay is fearless when it comes to confronting politicians and knows how to place pressure on them to act. It feels like intense game theory with multiple levels of potential action depending on how the politician reacts. The first day of the visit, we saw waste processing machinery that simply had the metal casing but no machine inside. A local politician claimed that he had purchased the whole machinery but that the mechanical portions had been stolen when in fact he had only purchased the casing and pocketed the difference. We found some small waste collection vehicles that had been sitting outside a mechanics shop for over a month and a half because a politician only paid for some replacement parts and then pocketed the difference. Sanjay confronted the local government officials and used more influential, higher level politicians to push the local government to act.

Janseva, the NGO in Osmanabad, faces numerous political barriers, from being asked for bribes to not receiving payments on time from the Municipality. Most of the staff is from within 100 km of Osmanabad, sacrificing comfort and time with family to work seven days a week. Despite working so hard, starting their day at 6am in the firestation yard where the tractors are, local politicians create trouble for the waste collectors and harass the NGO members, disrupting services from time to time. I was able to see the other side of managing waste through a politician’s perspective on my second field visit, while evaluating a potential city in Andhra Pradesh for us to work in. My co-intern and I rolled through the streets of Kurnool with the Municipal Health Officer, Dr. Ranga Reddy, learning about citizens’ perspectives, threatening to shut down restaurants and vendors unless they start using garbage cans, calling sanitation inspectors on the spot to take care of littered roads, and investigating the relationships between ragpickers and scrap dealers. Dr. Reddy is passionate and determined to make the city more hygienic and healthy and has plenty of tractors to collect waste, nearly 400 employees just for solid waste management, 40 acres of land for dumping and potentially composting, etc etc. He is currently collecting waste from 60% of the households. But he also has 100 garbage collecting tricycles laying in the Municipal Corporation’s yard, rusting away because he does not have the funds to hire workers to use those tricycles for the remaining 40% of the city.

Gamana, an Andhra wide NGO with a field office in Kurnool, has been and is ready to continue spreading awareness to households about segregating waste but has stopped because the Municipality does not have the ability to process waste separately yet. Gamana is also incredible at organizing ragpicker communities into formal cooperatives to manage both waste collection and processing. There is plenty of enthusiasm and capability on the ground; however, a lack of operational capital prevents a fully integrated waste management solution.

Waste Ventures is the key to both of these cities, using its influence to manage political instability to ensure smooth operations on the ground as well as potentially filling a funding gap. These field visits got me quite inspired, seeing such passionate, invested individuals working with citizens and ragpickers to make waste related livelihoods more dignified while also cleaning up cities. Project development will take time but with Waste Ventures’ intervention, I have faith that ragpickers and cleanliness with prevail and overcome corruption and other barriers to have a happy ending.