Lessons from a slum clean-up

Six months ago, Govardhanpurwa, a slum in Kanpur city, was a festering dump. Flies and other vectors abounded. Waterborne diseases were rampant. The story of how all this changed affirms something I’ve suspected for a while: Developing community ties has far-reaching and often unexpected social gains. This is especially true in urban slums, which aren’t as well-knit as villages that are still bound in a web of traditional relationships. Slum dwellers will often tell you that they’re too busy fighting for everyday survival to develop neighbourly ties. Govardhanpurwa was no different until WaterAid India and their field partner Shramik Bharti set up a group of six locals to operate a water pump twice a day and manage their own water supply.

“During these meetings, I met Raju Valmiki,” said Raja Ram. “We realised we’d played together as children, lived a stone’s throw away and still didn’t know each other at all,” he added. Perhaps working together to successfully resolve their water supply issue made the men aware of the power of collective action. During one of their water meetings, they digressed from the issue at hand to talk about the filth in their slum that was exacerbated by the lack of a door-to-door garbage collection service. “It seemed ironic that a neighbourhood inhabited by Dalits who cleaned other people’s homes and streets didn’t have anyone to pick their own waste,” said Valmiki, a burly 45-year-old in a bright red shirt. “When the group asked me to start a paid waste collection service here, I jumped at the idea,” he added.

Since November 2018, Valmiki has been taking his collection cart issued by the municipality to the 50 households in Govardhanpurwa. “I segregate the waste, sell whatever can be recycled to the local kabadiwala and throw the rest in the municipality dump,” said he. Every day, he is able to sell recyclables for Rs 10-20. “This has become my pocket money,” he grins. Valimiki charges every household he services Rs 30 per month. He’s happy to have the extra income. “I earn about Rs 6,500 sweeping people’s homes,” he says adding, “but the Rs 1,500 I earn from cleaning up my own neighbourhood seems much more precious.”

Valmiki, Ram and their water committee friends now want to compost the wet waste. Ram says the compost could be used to develop small vegetable patches within the slum. His wife had planted sponge gourd in an unused bucket last year and it gave them a good supply of green vegetables he might not have been able to afford. “Though we were supposed to simply manage the water pump, we now want to take up other projects to make our slum a better place,” he says. 

Today, thanks to the group’s initiative, Govardhanpurwa has clean drains, spotless alleys and dustbins outside every home. “Everyone is appreciative of how nice our neighbourhood looks now,” says Valmiki. “And this gives me hope that things might get better as time goes.” It would be simplistic to attribute this transformation entirely to the formation of the water management committee in Govardhanpurwa, but one cannot deny that much of this transformation occurred only after a couple of neighbours became friends.