Our Story

In 2010, Anslem Rosario and Nalini Shekar decided to form a group to organize waste pickers city-wide in Bengaluru and provide a platform for them to be recognised for their economic contribution and as environmentalists. Today we know that waste pickers’ work is carbon negative ^[1].

Hasiru Dala (meaning Green Force in Kannada) was formed organically, the name chosen by waste pickers. Our main reason for organising was to ensure livelihoods with dignity for the community, and to maintain their access to waste as the city built and upgraded. We consider that the integration of waste pickers and informal waste workers into formal waste management of the city is vital.

In 2011, concerned groups including the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers made a request at the Lok Adalat (public citizen’s forum within the Karnataka High Court) for recognition of waste pickers’ contribution and occupational identity rights.

Following the Lok Adalat’s direction in 2011, the BBMP initiated proceedings to register waste pickers and enumerate scrap dealers. Thus Bengaluru became the first city in India where Occupational Identity Cards were issued to waste pickers and informal waste workers with the signature of Commissioner on each of the cards. Hasiru Dala’s rigorous campaigning paid off and the waste pickers were no longer faceless, nameless, anonymous labourers– they became legitimate workers of the city.

Predictable income and social security, are two sides of the same coin, and are the first step towards living wages.

In the absence of living wages, waste pickers struggle to meet the expenses of their family, increasing education costs for children or increasing food becomes a challenge. Social security entitlements can offset the gaps in the non-liveable wage; increasing livelihood stability will increase and regularise earnings.

Accessing social entitlement from city, state and central governments has been our focus from our initial years and it continues to be so. We work with other groups at state and central level to continuously bring the required changes in the policy for social security.

While the legal provisions enabled us to bring in predictable incomes for some waste pickers and build their skills, other waste pickers were not eligible for these provisions. We still work to ensure their rights under the law, and get them access to social security entitlements. We also work for their children’s opportunities for choice of study, and later occupations.

Through 2012 and 2013, Hasiru Dala kept its focus on identity rights enumeration and organisation of waste pickers and informal sector waste workers. In 2013, Hasiru Dala was incorporated as a Charitable Trust in Bengaluru. Along with Jain University and the Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT), we decided to look at the contribution of the waste pickers of the city. The findings were presented in a paper, “Informal Waste Workers Contribution in Bengaluru” at Icon SWM in 2014.

On average, a waste picker collects about 60 to 90 kilograms of waste in an 8-to-10-hour day. The findings revealed that the BBMP budget of 450 crores would have to increase by 23 lakhs if the 4,175 registered waste pickers in the study stopped working. Extrapolating the data for the estimated 15, 000 waste pickers that Bengaluru city harbours, the study revealed that the savings were about 84 crores annually.

Another historic moment came with the setting up of Kartavya – the Dry Waste Collection Centre, an aggregation centre of inorganic waste at ward level by the Municipal Corporation, and its operationalisation by waste pickers and scrap dealers. Hasiru Dala also advocated for the inclusion of children of waste pickers in Government Pre-Matric Scholarships to the Children Of Those Engaged In Occupations Involving Cleaning And Prone To Health Hazards. Waste pickers had not originally been included in this category.

Following the study on waste pickers from mid-2014 to September 2015, another study was undertaken by SWMRT to look at the contribution of the informal sector workers managing the Dry Waste Collection Centres (DWCCs), from the point of view of inflow of waste into the DWCC and the savings to the municipality. The six months’ (January to July 2015) Waste Diversion Data from thirty-two Dry Waste Collection Centres revealed that the centres had made exceptional progress in waste diversion and retrieval of dry waste of over 23, 73,908.8 kilograms, with an annual savings of about Rupees 48.79 lakhs.

What we were learning and trying to implement was that stability of the ecosystem translates to predictable income: Building an eco-system that provides equal opportunity to succeed is key to change, bringing professionalism in the work of waste pickers and building better lives. Our experience has shown that once an opportunity is created, there is a leap in the living standards of waste pickers. Instituting equal opportunity brings stability.

In 2015, the Buguri children’s programme organised a Summer School, with the aim of supporting a “Zero Drop Outs” campaign. Children were introduced to book reading by an author of children’s books. It was at this time children expressed interest in having a reading club in their basti. And so we were also beginning to see that it was not enough to take care of livelihood for adults, but we had to lay the groundwork for educational opportunities for children. Compulsory education is the law, but a last-mile connect that facilitates enrollment to schools and quality education is still a far away dream for many children of waste pickers. Formal education with creative input for self-growth is an important stepping stone for a strong foundation. Our community library that focuses on reading skills and life skills has proved a great augment to academic inputs for children.

In 2015, accompanied by Kabir Arora of Alliance of Indian waste pickers (AIW), Mansoor Gous, a former waste picker and now DWCC operator, left for France on the 29th of November to attend the climate change conference, COP21, Paris. Like Mansoor, there were waste pickers from different parts of the globe, including South America, USA, China, Africa, Bangladesh and Europe. Mansoor was invited to share his views in seven different events that were held across the 9 days he was there. Mansoor spoke about the importance of the 3 R’s – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.The first two are the most important – we need to reduce thoughtless consumption and reuse whatever we can instead of throwing things away. Recycling should be a last resort, as it takes time, energy and does not always produce plastic at the same quality levels. However, recycling is still a better option than creating virgin plastic and using more fossil fuels.

In 2016, at the Expert Group Meeting on the Informal Economy in Indonesia, Indira spoke at the third session of the Preparatory Committee of the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Surabaya, Indonesia. The conference was organised by Global Social Economy Forum (GSEF) along with partner organisations. She got a chance to speak to participants from across the world about the municipal corporation, challenges in the informal sector of waste pickers, importance of waste segregation and related issues. Though accompanied by Kabir Arora, she was the lone person to represent Bengaluru.

In 2016, Hasiru Dala (along with other organizations such as SWMRT and AIW) consulted with the The Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) which led to the guideline of inclusion of waste pickers and informal waste collectors in the Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 for the collection and management of waste.

In 2017, the BBMP entered into an agreement with waste pickers to facilitate door-to-door collection of segregated dry waste by DWCCs, which was previously handled by large contractors of solid waste management. We expanded to Mysuru, Chamarajanagar and worked to establish similar relationships with the local informal waste collection communities as well as with local municipal authorities. We received permission to facilitate the provision of Occupational Identity Cards and to create the infrastructure for three streams of waste collection, and the integration of the waste pickers into the municipal SWM system.

Financial literacy trainings were developed to show waste pickers how to access institutional finance and savings accounts, and the use of those institutions for their own benefit. Some waste pickers have been trained to train others about financial literacy – making this a self-sustaining venture. The National Safai Karamcharis Finance & Development Corporation (NSKFDC) and Vijaya Bank for the first time offered an overdraft facility for waste pickers who operated DWCCs. Nine operators were chosen for this pilot project, all of whom were able to maintain their repayments and in some cases gained enough credit to have an expanded credit limit. Most of these DWCC operators, former waste pickers, had never even had a bank account before. This was their first experience with institutional finance. The offer of the overdraft loan facility was an unprecedented act of trust in the operator’s ability to repay that loan and use the funds responsibly as entrepreneurs running a small business.

In 2019, we expanded to Hubbali-Dharwad, Davanagere, Mangaluru, and also to Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh and Trichy and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. While some of our approaches stayed the same – to make contact with local communities and work with local municipalities, other strategies had to change. Mangaluru, with its river-network and beach sides, collects different levels of black spot activity, and the communities in waste collection include fishing communities.

Hubbali-Dharwad and Rajahmundry are tier-2 cities with different waste generation behaviours than we are accustomed to even in “smaller” towns such as Mysuru. Trichy and Coimbatore have a very strong base of communities involved in various sanitation activities, but fewer direct waste picking communities. Working with these communities and also with the local governments allowed us to drive to the basic core of the Hasiru Dala approach – integration of informal workers into formalised, streamlined and segregated waste collection and management.

Alongside, we were also working on housing. Housing improves security: stable housing with basic amenities can bring in opportunity and quantum change in the life of waste pickers. Safe homes without the fear of eviction is a huge relief for families: with official proof of address you can send your children to school, apply for benefits and identification, and be considered for other inclusion efforts.

The BBMP released its SWM bye-laws in early 2020, with inputs from Hasiru Dala and other waste advocacy groups.

When the national lockdown to restrict the spread of COVID 19 was announced in Bengaluru, thousands of WP families were on the verge of starvation due to loss of their regular source of income. The urgent task was to provide these families with some immediate relief. Across Karnataka, and in Trichy & Coimbatore, and Rajahmundry , we worked to provide food relief and hygiene support for nearly 50,000 waste picker families and families of daily wage earners.

Our journey of ten years has been very long, and has felt very short. And there is much yet to be done!

Our focus will be on access to public housing for waste pickers who are on rent, or the pavement and for both locals and migrants. Our government is also very keen on public housing and we have become that last mile connect to get waste pickers their required KYC document to access public housing. We have learned that this is a long journey, taking time and perseverance.

With housing we will work toward inclusion of waste pickers with other social security like health services, food security. And lastly, upgrading skills, creating innovative livelihoods that bring in predictable income to the waste pickers’ family form the third dimension of our direct work with waste pickers.

Research in the field of livelihood and solid waste management training will continue to be the foundation on which we advocate for institutionalised changes to the waste ecosystem

We look forward to the day, not too far off, where we do not need to exist in our current form, where waste pickers are their own support and advocates.