The Collector, Delhi
Anshu Gupta was studying journalism at Delhi when he came across Habib, who used to take care of abandoned bodies near LNJP hospital. It was the winter of 1991 and often, Habib’s daughter would cling to a corpse to keep herself warm. The little girl didn’t have any warm clothes. The same year, Anshu was working with the earthquake victims of Uttarkashi, when he saw people wearing jackets made out of gunnysacks. They didn’t want food or money. They just wanted warm coats.
For the next seven years Anshu worked as a corporate communications specialist but yesterday’s images still haunted him. He realized that India didn’t have a single organization to supply clothes to the poor and dispossessed. Goonj was born – an NGO that collects and donates clothes, leftover uniforms, backpacks, pencils, books and notebooks to poor people across the country. “Clothing is a basic need, not disaster-relief material. Why should the poor wait for a disaster to get some clothes,” says Anshu, who chucked his job with Escorts and started Goonj by taking all the extra clothes he found at home and the houses of friends and relatives and distributing them on Delhi’s roads.
What started as a single-room, one-man organization has 15 offices, 125 employees and a fleet of volunteers across the country today. Anshu insists, “We never wanted to grow as an organization. We wanted to grow as an idea so that people replicate it.”
Volunteers go door to door, collecting clothes, books, waterbottles – anything that can be used by the poor in the hamlets of Bihar, Orissa or Assam. Anshu says Goonj is helping to “change the mindset of the urban population about the optimal utilization of vital resources through concepts like recycle and reuse.”
As well as lending a hand to those who need it most.
– Shobhan Saxena
The Shoe Santa, Mumbai
The man sleeping outside a shop near Kandivili station is drunk. Nandan Pandya wakes him up with a question: “Do you have slippers?” The man’s brow furrows. Pandya ferrets out a pair of new black plastic slippers from a polythene bag and asks him to try them on. The man takes the pair, fidgets, then holds them close to his chest and salutes the ground. It’s Pandya’s cue to leave.
For eight years, Pandya, 21, a final-year engineering student, has greeted many owners of unhappy feet in this way. Most are “too overwhelmed to emote”. Every week, Pandya buys at least six or seven pairs of slippers and scans the streets for cracked heels, swollen ankles, raw soles – any evidence of prolonged barefootedness. His target audience includes garland-sellers, hawkers, beggars, pavement-dwellers – people who can’t afford to throw shoes at politicians no matter how much they want to.
Pandya spends nearly Rs 300 on his goody bag. He buys only plastic slippers. “Many people want rainy-day shoes as they suffer from various foot diseases when they step into puddles,” says the student, whose beneficiaries are mainly to be found at suburban stations.
So why does he do this knowing full well that many of his recipients might sell his gift rather than wear it? He always adds the careful warning, “Please don’t sell these,” but says it doesn’t really bother him if they do. “I don’t give because they will use the shoes, I give because they need it.” He says his slipper service has changed him forever. “Now, I don’t shout when the rickshawallah refuses to hand me back a five-rupee balance.”
-Sharmila Ganesan-Ram
TOI