Representative image only
This is literally a rags to riches story. It’s the tale of how one lonely ragpicker lady made it so big that she now runs an organisation with a turnover of rupees one crore!
Manjula Vaghela is now 60 years old and heads a cleaner cooperative with 400 members that provide cleaning and housekeeping services to 45 institutions and societies in Ahmedabad. She was even elected as the President of the Board of SEWA Bank in Ahmedabad in 2007.
But once upon a time, Manjula was just a young lowly ragpicker earning a measly Rs 5 a day. On rainy days, even that amount eluded her. A rag picker’s work begins at the crack of dawn, when she picks up her large thela and sets off on her daily beat, scrounging and foraging among other people’s waste, going where nobody else wants to go. She picks the recyclables amidst the mounds of garbage, like a needle in a haystack, and when her sack is full, which takes her all day, she sells it to a scrap dealer. Their only advantage was that ragpickers always formed collectives of their own.
It was their encounter with Elaben Bhatt, founder of Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which seeded the idea of forming Shri Saundarya Safai Utkarsh Mahila Sewa Sahkari Mandali Ltd (SSSUMSSML), a collective of 40 women at that time who offer cleaning services.
By this time, Manjulaben had already been married, borne a son, but then tragedy struck her family, forcing her to become the only earning member of the family and provide for her son.
SEWA at that time was already acting as SHG and cooperative society, in helping women employed in unorganised sectors like ragpicking to find access to interest-free loans and start their own savings. With this idea, a group of ragpickers suddenly found an alternate occupation with means to grow.
They began with toilet cleaning and sweeping and soon diversified into other odd jobs during wedding seasons like decorating the reception area, helping in serving food and beverages and the washing up jobs after that, writes Elaben Bhatt in her book, We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India. This was, of course, way back in the 80s and early 90s when the wedding industry wasn’t that organised. The fact that these women wore uniforms and gloves helped with the professional impression they gave out.
“National Institute of Design was the first institution to give business to us. Next, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) hired our 15 women,” says Manjula, who was then the chief supervisor.
But it wasn’t without struggles. They got hit by a lawsuit from employee unions of the various institutions where they had undertaken a cleaning contract. Under the cooperative society laws at that time, getting their cooperative registered was a problem because they were selling a service, not a product – something that was unheard of in the 80s. It took all of five years and several trips to the court over the lawsuit, before the society could get registered and the women could progress ahead.
The Saundarya Mandali Collective of 400 women, headed by Manjula
Over the years, Saundarya Mandali has gone from strength to strength through several levels of training. From providing cleaning services in institutions of national repute to residential societies, they also offered services during Vibrant Gujarat summits in the past.
The majority of the cleaning women are former paper pickers. Their gunny collection bags now replaced with modern equipment including road cleaners, vacuum cleaners, high-jet pressure, micro-fibre mops, floor cleaners, carpet shampooing machines, scrubbers and extractors, these women claim to do a mean cleaning job.
It was a milestone hitting the Rs 1 crore turnover mark. The next target is to make illiterate women tech-savvy to ensure that they can crack the e-tendering process.
“Today companies and institutes issue e-tender for contracts and job work which we find difficult to fill as we are technologically challenged. But we shall overcome this too,” says Hemaben Parmar, who is associated with Saundarya Mandali for the last 20 years. Parmar’s mother also used to be member of this cooperative and her daughter too is with SEWA.
In the midst of all this, Manjulaben even managed to earn enough to put her son through school and medical college to become the doctor that he is today. Both Manjulaben and her son were recently honoured by the college that he attended. He has tried to convince her that after all these years she should finally stop working, but Manjulaben won’t hear of it. “Why are you ashamed of my labour?” she asked him indignantly. “It’s because of my labour that you became a doctor. Besides, I want to work!”
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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