India
Centre identifies 70K women influencers contributing big to govt’s Garbage Free City mission | India News
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NEW DELHI: Recognising the women driving the government’s Swachhta mission across cities and to make them free from garbage, the Centre has identified nearly 70,000 such women influencers who are engaged in door-to-door collection, segregation and management of municipal waste. Most of them are part of women-led Self Help Groups (SGHs).
The housing ministry said on Wednesday that out of the 9,000 SHGs, nearly 4,000 are working in the solid waste management sector and efforts are being made to extend assistance to such groups so that their members have better income and also take up more work. According to the ministry, four lakh women are directly engaged in sanitation and waste management as an enterprise in urban India.
Addressing a conference titled “Swachhotsav-2023: Rally for Garbage Free Cities”, which saw participation of representations from over 300 SHGs, Union housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri said women are leading the “Garbage Free Cities” movement in the country. The minister said Swachhta is a noble job. His ministry also said the government has not only provided dignity to women through the Swachh Bharat Mission, but also concrete livelihood opportunities.
Union housing and urban affairs secretary Manoj Joshi also lauded the contribution of women in waste management. “Now the target is to increase their income and get more investment,” he added.
Representatives from SHGs also shared their stories of how they faced challenges when they took up tasks like door-to-door collection of waste and monthly charges (user fee) for this.
One such participant Sangeeta Ramteke from Nagpur said when she started a small business of collecting junk and waste from neighbourhood, none supported her. “People asked me why I was taking up this task. I replied that if we can clean our house, why can’t we make our mother earth clean. Gradually, people understood my view and I could get enough scrap. Now we have a group of women and we earn around Rs 10,000 per month,” she said.
Sangeeta said this regular income helped her son to pursue education and now he is an engineer with Infosys. Responding to a question whether her son never asked her to stop working, she said, “I have told her I will continue doing this. I want the children of my friends in the group to do well.”
Urmila, another such SHG representative from Uttarakhand said they also faced challenges when they started collecting waste from houses in their locality. “When we started asking Rs 20 user charge per household, initially people did not agree. But we continued collecting and subsequently people were convinced. Now everyone wants us to collect their waste and they are paying the user charge as well,” she said.
The housing ministry said on Wednesday that out of the 9,000 SHGs, nearly 4,000 are working in the solid waste management sector and efforts are being made to extend assistance to such groups so that their members have better income and also take up more work. According to the ministry, four lakh women are directly engaged in sanitation and waste management as an enterprise in urban India.
Addressing a conference titled “Swachhotsav-2023: Rally for Garbage Free Cities”, which saw participation of representations from over 300 SHGs, Union housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri said women are leading the “Garbage Free Cities” movement in the country. The minister said Swachhta is a noble job. His ministry also said the government has not only provided dignity to women through the Swachh Bharat Mission, but also concrete livelihood opportunities.
Union housing and urban affairs secretary Manoj Joshi also lauded the contribution of women in waste management. “Now the target is to increase their income and get more investment,” he added.
Representatives from SHGs also shared their stories of how they faced challenges when they took up tasks like door-to-door collection of waste and monthly charges (user fee) for this.
One such participant Sangeeta Ramteke from Nagpur said when she started a small business of collecting junk and waste from neighbourhood, none supported her. “People asked me why I was taking up this task. I replied that if we can clean our house, why can’t we make our mother earth clean. Gradually, people understood my view and I could get enough scrap. Now we have a group of women and we earn around Rs 10,000 per month,” she said.
Sangeeta said this regular income helped her son to pursue education and now he is an engineer with Infosys. Responding to a question whether her son never asked her to stop working, she said, “I have told her I will continue doing this. I want the children of my friends in the group to do well.”
Urmila, another such SHG representative from Uttarakhand said they also faced challenges when they started collecting waste from houses in their locality. “When we started asking Rs 20 user charge per household, initially people did not agree. But we continued collecting and subsequently people were convinced. Now everyone wants us to collect their waste and they are paying the user charge as well,” she said.
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