How this CSR initiative turned Delhi rag pickers into company shareholders

A livelihood initiative that began as a CSR activity is slowly giving a new lease of life to the waste pickers of one of the oldest landfills in Delhi

Piles of torn paper, heaps of plastic, pieces of broken glass, rotting food waste, rodents nibbling away at them and human hands trying to find scrap that can be sold for a decent amount. It’s not easy living in the middle of a landfill and earn through waste-picking. Ghazipur in East Delhi has one of the oldest functional landfills in the city. Hundreds of families live near this dumpsite.

Spread over 70 acres, this landfill holds about 150 lakh tonnes of waste. The nearby flower market lacks a cold storage facility, so the unsold flowers too made its way to the dump. The women of the village worked as rag pickers in the mounds of garbage. Even with flowers around them, it was anything but a bed of roses to work there every day.

In 2013, when Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) set up a 12 MW waste to energy power plant in Ghazipur, they risked leaving hundreds of waste-pickers without jobs and came up with Gulmeher - a livelihood initiative to help members of the community.

“There’s a world of difference between being employed here and working as a ragpicker” recalls Salma, one of the many artists working for Gulmeher since its inception.  “We don’t fall sick that often now and the conditions are significantly better,” she adds.

Thirty four rag-picker women were trained to make quality handicrafts, paper bags and chemical-free colours from discarded flowers. An embroidery unit and a paper recycling unit that produces paper on commercial order was also set up with women from the locality. An education center was formed for their children and currently, 200 children are benefitting from it.

Over the years, Salma has saved enough for building two houses — one where she resides and the other one in her village. After she expressed her desire to study, the management at Gulmeher helped her and she recently gave exams for class five. What started as a CSR initiative has managed to train 120 women into skilled artisans, have re-used 15 tons of flowers and recycled 7,000 kilograms of paper.

“The origin of Gulmeher actually traces back to Business Standard. Around seven years back, I came across a column on dried flowers in the paper by Surinder Sood. I reached out to him and he put me across to department heads in the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and that was the genesis of Gulmeher,” said Anurag Kashyap, mentor at Gulmeher, since its inception.

“Initially, these women didn’t have the inclination and energy to even sit for half an hour. So we had to physically hold them down at times because they were so accustomed to standing or being on the move throughout,” he adds.

Vidwata Singh, chief designer at Gulmeher believes there’s more to design than what meets the eye. “It’s not only about making beautiful things. I wanted to figure about what design meant to me,” recalls Singh who was a student at NIFT when she joined as an intern at IL&FS in 2013. 

“These women didn’t have any skills in this field. So we started with baby steps by making greeting cards — the easiest of them all — and even that was challenging. Gradually, we moved to more intricate designs and moved on to other products,” adds Singh.

The women are able to earn between Rs 5,000-7,000 monthly and work for around five hours per day. Many of them have saved money for their children’s education, build a toilet in their homes and contributed to making their houses pakka.

Kusum Lata, another artist says “I’ve learned a lot from here in the last few years. I’m not scared of stepping out anymore. Though my husband and family sometimes tell me not to work and stay at home but I like working and don’t want to ask them for money”

In the last few weeks, leading up to Holi, Gulmeher was invited to conduct a number of workshops on making natural colours and that has been a huge step-up for these women.

Today, Gulmeher Green Producer Company, an independent entity has these once waste-picking women as shareholders. After IL&FS backing out, the company was unsure if it would be able to sustain itself in terms of financial and managerial capacity. It is now backed by Kashyap’s Shakti foundation.

 “Initially I had a little hesitation and was unsure if I’ll be able to do it or not. But it’s their smile, that's so heart-warming and sincere, despite how challenging their lives are, gave me a lot of strength and I’m glad I stuck with it all the way,” said Singh.