Literally a rags-to-riches story: He made millions out of trash
new delhi — Jai Prakash Choudhary is generally known in the billion dollar rag-picking business as Santu. Forty-year-old Santu is from Munger, Bihar. He has spent the last 25 years in Delhi. And it has been quite a life.
Santu had come to the Indian capital to make a living. What the city had for him was the job of a ragpicker. Santu had no option but to accept the menial job. He was an assiduous ragpicker and made about Rs150 a day. It was tough, soul killing work carried mostly scouring through rubbish and garbage for recyclable materials.
In the mid-90s, Santu could be seen walking around Connaught Place and Central Delhi with a dirty sack on his back. He would be looking for waste that he could resell. The police and the public at that time identified ragpickers as potential criminals. Tired of the physical and verbal abuse, Santu returned to his village, broken hearted.
A couple of months later, however, poverty drove him back to his miserable job in Delhi. He opened a small roadside shop in Raja Bazar. He bought dry waste from trash collectors and re-sold it.
And he resold it well. So much so that today he sells stuff retrieved from trash worth Rs1.1 million every month. And he has employed 160 people at his two waste segregation centres in the capital. Santu had become the hero of ragpickers in Delhi.
The turning point in his life came when in 1999 Santu formed an organisation of ragpickers called Safai Sena (Cleaning Army) with the help of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, an NGO that works for a better deal for ragpickers. The Safai Sena played an important role in cleaning the city and earned a reputation as a certain class of workers; not as criminals.
Santu’s real life lessons and practical knowledge in collecting trash and segregating it into stuff that can be recycled have made him a sort of guru for environmentalists as well.
He has delivered his lecture in places like Copenhagen, Luxembourg and Brazil on waste recycling. Along side, he has been instrumental in changing the folks’ perception of the business of ragpicking from a dirty, furtive trade to one that is essential input for environmental preservation.
It had not been a smooth journey, though. Santu had to shift his shop and waste godowns several times and rebuild them as the police pulled these down on complaints from the public that they could not live with the odour emanating from their neighborhood. Real estate development also contributed to his frequent displacement and disruptions.
In 2012, he established his waste segregation centre in Sikandarpur in Ghaziabad, far away from human settlements. He later set up another dry waste collection centre near the New Delhi Railway Station, a place where waste accumulated by the minute. His work force is loyal to him. And Santu takes good care of them.
Clearly, a lot of good can come out from rubbish.