Anshu Gupta....
A man, who left his job in a well-known firm to work for the less privileged in society, created a movement ‘Cloth for Work’ in the country to provide underutilised clothes and household articles to poor in exchange for social work in rural areas.
The man of the moment, NGO Goonj’s founder Anshu Gupta, made India proud when the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation announced his name for the coveted prize. In an interview to The Pioneer, Gupta spoke to Hemanta Kumar Pradhan about his journey and vision.
How do you feel after getting the most coveted award of the Asia continentIJ
It’s an honour, but it will not affect our work. We will continue our work like before and try to do more innovative works to help the poorest of the poor in the country.
What is ‘Cloth for Work’ concept and how it created a movement of giving in the countryIJ
‘Cloth for Work’ is a simple concept, but has wider impact. From repairing roads, recharging water ponds, building bamboo bridges to digging wells in rural areas, we take help of people and provide clothes and other household materials including utensils and furniture as reward for their labour.
We respect our people’s dignity that they don’t accept any material free of cost without any work. So, we thought we will engage the people in development works of their area and then gift clothes and other materials to them. We have created two powerful currencies for development work, material and labour.
How you get clothes and other materials and where you process itIJ
We have three main hubs at Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. We collect underutilised and used materials from these cities and process it in these hubs to fit the identified needs of recipient groups. More than 300 people are working fulltime in these hubs and 11 offices in the country. We collect from urban locations and provide these in rural areas after proper processing. We have provided 1,500 to 2,000 tonnes of recycled materials within last two years.
Why you want to separate charity from social serviceIJ
We don’t want to hurt self respect and dignity of a person by giving any cloth or material free of cost as we do in the case of beggar.
We need to change the trend of giving anything free of cost. So we provide clothes or other materials in exchange of labour.
What other flagship programmes do you haveIJ Besides ‘Cloth for Work’ programme, we have other programmes like ‘School to School’ programme, ‘Rahat’ initiative to help disaster affected people and sanitary pad distribution under ‘Not Just a piece of Cloth’.
Rahat is about systematic approach in large scale disaster relief and rehabilitation work with many innovative approaches.
Apart from focusing on different gaps in macro disaster work, Goonj has evolved income generation initiatives like converting waste clothes into traditional mattresses, school bag making, village haats and tailoring centers to bring back the disaster hit local economy to normalcy.
The ‘School to School’ initiative is designed to provide basic school materials to get the children to schools, while ‘Not Just a piece of Cloth’ initiative is to help the rural womenfolk to understand the use of sanitary napkins to maintain menstrual hygiene.
We have produced three million sanitary pads after processing underutilised clothes and these are the cheapest in the world.
What motivated you to start GoonjIJ After completion of journalism course in the Indian Institute Mass Communication (IIMC), I started working as freelancer in New Delhi.
One fine day I met a person, Habib bhai, who was running his family by picking up abandoned bodies and cremating for a fee.
Out of my curiosity, I followed him and spent seven days with him. While discussing with him, I found startling data that he was picking up more abandoned bodies in winter than summer season. Due to severe cold, several poor people die in the city. Even Habib bhai’s six-year-old daughter said she was sleeping among the bodies to avoid Delhi’s harsh winter.
It moved me and started planning to provide clothes to the poor. My journey began in 1999, when I and my wife contributed 67 pieces of personal clothing for the use of homeless people during winter. And then Goonj came into exist.
Which type of works you have done in OdishaIJ What’s your plan about the StateIJ
We have done some works in Odisha through our ‘Cloth for Work’ initiative since 2010. Our partners including Gram Vikash and Adhikar are working in Ganjam, Kandhamal, Jagatsinghpur, Puri, Baleswar, Mayurbhanj and other districts. We are focusing on remote rural and tribal pockets of the State.
We will give stress on ‘School to School’ programme and distribution of sanitary napkins to girls and womenfolk. Under the ‘School to School’ programme, we have already covered 350 educational institutions in 20-22 districts.
Through this programme, we provide pen, pencils and toys to children in village schools and Anganwadi centres.
We have learnt many things from Odisha about working with people here. We want to do more things on the coming days.