Tag Archives: environment

Waste of a Good Idea

7 Jul

THIS post was part of the TimeOut Mumbai cover story of the June 17-30, 2005 edition, “Local Heroes: Small people making a big difference.” See my other post in this story here.

Juhu Beach, Mumbai

For eight years, George Gopali “picked up the broom” and kept Juhu Beach clean. Four years ago, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation decided to replace Gopali’s efforts with beachcombers, or beach cleaning machines. While the machines do help in clearing human-created waste, ecologists complain that they also pick up small crabs and other creatures, disturbing the beach’s eco-system. Gopali describes his experience of working with the BMC, and his disappointment at being dumped at the altar.

“I wanted to do something for the city that has given me so much. My father was a manager in the BMC, so right from when I was a child, he would tell me that BMC employees don’t work because they know they’re going to get paid anyway, but private companies deliver. So I said to myself, when I grow up, I’ll do something different. I saw that we had beautiful beaches, why not keep them clean? It’s easy to complain, but no one wants to pick up a broom. I picked up the broom.

“I have a housekeeping business, George Enterprises, which cleans the premises of building societies. In 1992, I wrote to the municipal commissioner Sharad Kale, who liked my idea of cleaning up the beach. But he said that the BMC could not pay me directly, since the union would have objected. He told me, ‘There are 15 hotels around the beach, they are direct beneficiaries. Speak to them.’ So I asked the hotels to give me one room’s rent per month as payment. This added up to Rs 90,000 a month. Initially, I invested my own money, but two years later, the BMC gave me three hoarding sites, which I rented out to advertisers.

“I used local boys as labour—drug addicts, boys who came to Mumbai to become film stars but slept on the beach, boys from the slums nearby. At first it was a struggle, but the BMC supported me. However, the hotels withdrew from the scheme after four months. Yet, I headed the cleanup for eight years, from 1992-2000. Then, BMC officials started thinking that I was making millions out of the cleanup, so they tendered the process. I got name-fame, so they didn’t want to pay me anymore. They floated a global tender with a minimum deposit of Rs 25 lakh to clean the beach with machines. So only big people with big money could bid for it. Now if I want to bid for a tender, I’d have to invest Rs 50-60 lakh. I’m not going to do that—the BMC are not good paymasters.

“The BMC has been thinking about getting beach-cleaning machines for the past 15 years. After my grand success, they began thinking, why not? I say, why? We have so much labour. Even the sieving of the sand was done with jaalis that we made ourselves. If you have that much money, put it into dustbins, benches and amenities for children and senior citizens! Plus there’s a high level of corrosion in the machines, so they don’t even last.

“We all say, ‘mere Bharat mahaan,” but we Indians are not proud of our country. People spit, the BMC head office stinks. I even sent a proposal to clean the BMC office because it stinks. The Juhu beach cleanup benefited the hoteliers, the public, the kids. One man can make a difference. You just need someone dedicated.”

As told to Jayati Vora

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Sweet Smell of Success

7 Jul

THIS post was part of the TimeOut Mumbai cover story of the June 17-30, 2005 edition, “Local Heroes: Small people making a big difference.” See my other post in this story here.

Name: Rahamim Jacob Chariker
Claim to fame: Subedar Road used to be called “Sandas” Road till he came along.

Trash litters the coast of Mumbai

Trash litters the coast of Mumbai

There were mornings when residents of Subedar Road in Worli would hold their noses to avoid inhaling the stench of excreta and garbage rising off the streets. The neighbourhood, a mix of slums, low-income buildings and posh housing, had a clutch of underutilised public toilets, and roads were used as commodes as well as garbage bins.

“The gents and ladies used to perform their morning duties on the road,” said Manohar Gokhale, a long-time Subedar Road resident. “The area was so much-ridden that the municipal corporation had stopped sending their trucks in here.” The stench was derogatorily called “Sandas Road” until four-and-a-half years ago, when Babuji, a former government employee, stepped in, got down on his knees and cleaned shit himself to set an example.

Babuji’s effort is especially commendable given Mumbai’s enormous sanitation crisis. The municipal corporation says that 71 percent of the population has access to sewerage services, but a walk by the city’s coast any morning makes that claim questionable: the rocks are occupied by tens of thousands of people using the beach as their toilet. The city of approximately 13 million people has only 1,300 public toilet blocks. When a senior municipal official spent the day outside a public toilet in Mahalaxmi’s Dhobi Ghat recently, she found that each seat served 917 people—in conditions she described as “stomach-churning.”

A Jew whose children live in Israel, Babuji’s real name is Rahamim Jacob Chariker, and as he is fond of reminding you, his real name has the cadence and magic of Amar Akbar Anthony. Chariker has used his name as a connector to plug into the various communities that live in the neighbourhood—when he meets a Muslim, he calls himself Rahamim, he’s Chariker for the Maharashtrians and Jacob for the Christians. He first decided to act on the stench that hung outside his window when some guests from Israel whom he had invited for dinner reached his building, took one whiff, and rushed back to their hotel.

Chariker hired a bunch of workers to clean up the roads, but when they refused to touch the human waste, he grabbed a shovel and set to work himself. He started persuading the adults through their kids: he would bribe the children to clean up the roads by handing them chocolates and bottles of phenyl. When the parents started quizzing the kids about where they were getting the chocolate from, the line of inquiry led to Babuji. The next step was to start cleaning the garbage. Chariker hired a 25-member team to remove upto 550 loads of garbage, with some help from the BMC’s dumper trucks. Over time, he has also managed to persuade the residents to start using the toilets and stop defecating on the streets.

Chariker claims to have planted close to 90,000 plants and trees in the 10-km radius from his home, using money sent to him from Israel. Today, the area bears no trace of its earlier, stinky avatar. Subedar Road is clean and is lined with trees bearing bananas, cherries, coconuts, sugarcane, mangoes, badams, tomatoes and Ayurvedic plants. “I bought whatever looked good,” Chariker said. He sends fruits from the trees to officials in the municipality. “They say, ‘It’s difficult to get fruit to grow even in an orchard, but you manage to coax them out of the footpath.”

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