Janwani monthly meeting
Info Guide — By Neha K Kulkarni on March 19, 2012 at 1:54 PM
This month the topic of discussion at Janwani was ‘Environment’, more so using of waste for generating energy. The evening started with a presentation by Ashwin Joshi who is deputy manager of Biodiversity Business at Kirlosker Integrated Tech. Ltd. He spoke about how waste if segregated and used in the right manner will be a great source of sustainable energy.
Though the initial cost for setting up these plants is high, they will eventually turn out to be extremely beneficial for the citizens here.
A very interesting thing happened at the meeting. A group called SWaCH Co-operative where SWaCH stands for Solid Waste Collection and Handling is incharge of collection of garage in PCMC. A short film featuring their work was part of the meeting too. The work done by these women is really commendable. The film also puts light on the mentalities of the citizens. If you have someone coming to your house to pick up garbage everyday, then why is it so difficult to pay them a certain amount for their services? We all hate even touching the garbage in our house. Why? Because its dirty and it stinks, but these women pick up others’ garbage and we cannot even pay them their basic fee?
A person from the audience asked these women, whether they feel that rich people crib to pay the month Rs20 per household/month? The ladies immediately answered that the not-so-rich households are extremely nice to us and treat us well. It’s only the rich people who never pay on time and treat us bad. Garbage segregation is also another people that these women face. Segregating dry and wet household waste makes it simpler during the recycling garbage. If the garbage is not segregated these women spend almost four hours after collection just segregating the garbage.
The sad part is these women work for more than 12 hours and get paid so less. All this for a job which is so important for keeping the environment clean.
These women who work in this organization are from villages without any educations. Some people complain about their lack of habits and the rude manner in which they speak. To this one of those ladies said that, “This is how we are. We’ve never been educated so we do not know how to speak to people. If we were educated we would have spoken just like you. But now that we have people like you around we’ll soon learn to speak accordingly.”
All I want to say is ‘Hats off to these women, there is a lot we need to learn from them as well.’
