Anshu Gupta - Goonj

Goonj : Bridging urban India's underutilised resources and rural India's unaddressed needs

Anshu Gupta, who founded Goonj, was in office yesterday as a first in a speaker series that we've begun at SELCO. He is one very intense and passionate individual, who asks and inspires people to ask, very fundamental questions of life in India today: why people don't raise their voice against so much that's wrong with our system, be it bad roads, corrupt government, safety for girls and above all poverty.

His focus is clothes. He says we talk of Roti, Kapda aur Makaan, (food, clothing and shelter) and while there are organizations and schemes and policies on food and shelter, clothing never gets a mention anywhere, it's not even considered an issue. He says, "Clothing does not even figure in the list of development subjects that encompasses 100-150 issues from domestic violence to global warming."

His defining moment came when, as a journalist, he met Habib a rickshaw puller in Delhi whose job it was to collect unclaimed dead bodies, and hand them over to the police, for which he'd get paid Rs.20 per body..that's back in 1999. And he found that even that job was seasonal, as winter in Delhi claimed a lot of lives. And when he met Habib's daughter she said 'jab tand lagthi hai tho laash ko pakadke so jaathi hoon' (when I get very cold I hold a dead body and sleep).

That moment haunted him for a long time....and thus started his mission of collecting unused clothes from well-to-do urban households, and distributing them among the poor. 

Today Goonj works across 21 states with 10 offices, 150 full-time people and thousands of volunteers and deals with 80-100 tonnes of material each month. Anshu believes that one can't change the nation merely by changing infrastructure. "It will change if people change. That's my career. I want to work as an informal incubator, as a person who just tells people - karke dekho...lage raho!"

He talks of the story of why Gandhiji shifted to wearing only a dhoti, of how there were these two sisters, one of who visited Gandhiji and when asked why her sister had not come she said it's because they had only one saree between them.

Anshu said he sees a lot of such cases, where women have only one saree and the reason they don't bathe everyday is because they do not have clothes. He says the extent of poverty in such places is something we do not even know about. He has many gut wrenching stories there.

The mechanism followed: the clothes they collect are not given as charity, it works on a sort of barter system, where the villagers are given the task of working on some infrastructure for their own community.... like a well, or bridge, or road and the clothes are given in return for the work. And he has a team which then follows up with the government for completion of the project under NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). 

One moment of pride: One Eid night years ago in Delhi, at one of Goonj's night distribution centres, a man walking on crutches who got a secondhand overcoat jubilantly cried - 'Ab hui hai meri Eid!' That was Anshu's biggest moment.