Sari, dhoti and sanitary pads for work

No longer have we gone past the introductory pleasantries than the conversation takes a morbid turn. “Do you know that in most villages women use the dirtiest piece of cloth during their periods because for them it’s a symbol of dirt?” Anshu Gupta asks.

He’s not done: “Two or three women in a family share the same cloth. Some even share it with neighbours. “People even wrap sand, wood ash and rice husk in cloth or use jute gunny bags.”

Taking stock of such an improbable reality four summers back made Gupta respond to it through his New Delhi-based not-for profit organisation, Goonj (which means echo), with the urgency it deserved.

Goonj had since its founding in 1998 collected clothes, shoes and utensils from urban residents and distributed them in tandem with 250-odd like-minded bodies to poor rural folk in return for repairing roads, desilting rivers and building bamboo bridges.

“We figured we could use the clothes we collect to make sanitary pads after a due process. Women can get them in return for work and we also sell a pack of five for ¤5. We also educate them about how to use it,” says Gupta, who hails from Meerut and got a double degree in journalism and advertising from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) in the early nineties before working with an ad agency.

Gupta says the central government now wants to distribute these pads in about 150 districts.

Goonj now processes 70-80 tonne of clothes, utensils, furniture, computers, etc, every month at its 10 centres across the country and makes 18-24 lakh sanitary napkins a year.

“For a lot of people, charity begins and ends with discarding their old clothes. The biggest problem with donation is you give what you have and not what someone needs,” Gupta opines. To buttress his argument, he says the average waist size of an urban male adult is 32-40 inches while that of his rural counterpart is 26-30 inches.

“About 30-40% of the clothes we get are unusable,” says Gupta.
Goonj has collection centres in various cities and charges ¤1 per clothing item to cover its transportation and storage costs. It covers 21 states.

The organisation sustains itself via contributions from individuals and the prize money from various awards. “In the last three years, we got ¤1.1 crore in awards,” notes Gupta. In 2007, Goonj bagged the World Bank’s Global Development Marketplace Award.

The NGO also has a range of products made from waste materials. For instance, it makes backpacks from torn jeans, mobiles pouches from ties, skipping ropes from saris and balls from sofa cushions.

“We want to grow not just as an organisation but as an idea. We are going to give people the copyright to copy our idea,” says Gupta, whose wife Meenakshi, also from IIMC, helps him out at Goonj.

Is it not tempting for Goonj to become a profit-making entity? “No, we want to prove to people that being an NGO is not bad.”