Indian NGO recycles old clothes for the poor

NEW DELHI: Anshu Gupta is like any other social activist. But what makes him stand out is his thought process.
“In an earthquake, it is the collapsing buildings that kill people. In floods, the water kills people. But in winter, it is not the cold that kills people, but it’s the lack of adequate clothing that claims lives. So, shouldn’t lack of clothing be considered a disaster?” Gupta reasons.
Founder of NGO Goonj (meaning echo in Hindi), Gupta is co-winner of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award.
He has been recognised for “his creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India, his enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor, and in reminding the world that true giving always respects and preserves human dignity”.
Even though countless organisations have been working on food, education and health, the most glaring oversight has been in the field of clothing.
With the vision that clothes are not about vanity, but about dignity, Goonj has sought to bridge the gap between extreme poverty and affluence by making discarded material of the rich a resource for the poor. “My endeavour is to make people aware that one city can look after several villages,” Gupta says.
While millions of people across the world believe in charity, the difference lies in the manner in which goals are achieved. That’s where Gupta made a beginning. Goonj, founded in 1999, gave recycling a whole new meaning. “What in other peoples’ eyes is waste, I consider it a resource. And that resource is provided to people in dire need of it in remote villages across India,” he says.
The eldest of four siblings, Gupta studied at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and then did his masters in Economics at Delhi University.
“As a student of mass communication, I often went to Old Delhi to get unusual stories. On a cold December night, I met a professional ‘unclaimed body collector’ and accompanied him to collect an unidentified body.
Wearing a thin cotton shirt, the man had presumably died of cold. It jolted me and I realised the basic need and importance of clothing, which was often overlooked and brought to the fore only as a disaster-relief measure,” he says.
The night changed Gupta’s life. He deliberated working on humanitarian aid and clothing for underprivileged people. The turning point came when he left his job as manager with an automobile manufacturer, Escorts, and decided to pursue Goonj with a small finance base out of his own provident fund.
The humble beginnings took off from Gupta’s two-bedroom rented apartment in south Delhi’s Sarita Vihar. Goonj began its operations with just 67 items of clothing gathered from family, relatives and his own and wife Meenakshi’s collection — some of which they had not worn for the past few years.
Today, Goonj is a movement with no geographical boundaries. Operational in 21 states, it transfers over 1,000 tonnes of used clothes, household goods and other essential items annually, from cities to various states, including the most vulnerable villages in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jammu & Kashmir and Maharashtra.