With Goonj, Anshu Gupta has shifted the focus from donor's pride to the receiver’s dignity. That he has also built a modest, frugal and articipative culture of working, is invaluable to the cause of social change
On the outskirts of Bhaktapur, the once-known historical city in Kathmandu which is now partly in ruins, is a small village Pikhel comprising of 52 dalit families. Since the day the first big earthquake struck on April 25, 2015, the entire village has been reduced to rubble. Each family has an average of five to six people. After a fortnight of the earthquake, the village had just two sacks of rice and some lentils to provide for the entire village. The villagers somehow managed to get a few tarpaulins and built seven community shelters and three kitchen shelters, where food for the entire community could be made. Running from pillar to post, requesting and begging authorities for help with relief, this community had almost given up. Just then, Goonj, an Indian non-profit social enterprise came in with relief for these distressed families of Pikhel. Goonj had worked on information imparted by a volunteer.
conducted relief operations across all six majorly affected districts of Nepal (See box on Nepal). The organisation did this by partnering with at least 15 local NGOs in Nepal. The aim was to reach out to the most inaccessible areas. “Local people are well aware of the area, its people, terrain, and the nuances. While working in a new place, this system makes it easier for us to set up our operations to conduct relief work seamlessly,” explains Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj. Where local people’s strength in terms of local knowledge is enhanced, Goonj fills in the gap by bringing in its meticulous, yet simple and straightforward system of working.
The Nepal earthquake was Goonj’s first foray into international relief. Gupta was in Nepal on April 28, and started work with a two-member team. It was also one of the only Indian organisations that carried out relief work on such a large scale in an international country. It’s the years of learning and experience that Goonj brought to Nepal. It has relentlessly reached out to the country’s far-flung villages since April 28, 2015, and continued the work for almost one-and-a-half months, with a lean team of just two or three staffers, other being local volunteers. The organisation is focussed to work on ignored basic needs such clothing, sanitary pads for village and slums in India, while changing the dynamics of giving and receiving with dignity.
Goonj (Echo, as the word means) was founded by Ashu Gupta, a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay award, nearly 16 years ago. The journey started with his chance encounter with a body collector, who in his thin cotton shirt in the peak of Delhi winters, would pick up dead bodies of people who died due to cold on the streets and were left abandoned. Worse still, his daughter would hug dead bodies and slept since they would keep her warm without bothering her. That incident was the premise to start Goonj. Gupta started out with only 67 pieces of clothing that his wife and he had collected but. However, they did not want to give it away in charity, but as a reward for work and the concept of cloth-for-work (CFW) came into being.
service – digging a well, making a road, cleaning a lake and so on – we’ll give the villagers whatever they need, without compromising their dignity,” explains Gupta. With this, Gupta wants to shift the focus from donor's pride to the receivers' dignity. The model of turning old material as a resource for rural development was welcomed by villagers and grassroot partner organisations. Under the CFW programme, communities have built bamboo bridges, dug up wells, done bunding of acres of land, developed small irrigation canals, built drainage systems, built village schools and have taken up massive exercises of repairing roads, developing water harvesting systems to cleaning up water bodies. All these projects are done not by paying wages to people, but by making them understand their own community power, using old material as a reward.
Some of the examples are villagers in Khandwa (Madhya Pradesh) have built a water tank; de-silted a well in Chapra (Bihar); built a school in Sitamani, Bihar -- performing a total of over 1,500 community acts so far. Over 3,00,000 kg of throwaway waste cloth has been converted into traditional mattresses/ quilts as large-scale income generation activity in villages. The model is working extremely well in Kashmir, too, where initiative was started after the floods of 2014. Today, a large number of women in Kashmir are employed in making these quilts and earn a living. Talking about CFW, Meenakshi Gupta, co-founder of Goonj, explains about the Vapsi initiative, too. She says, “This was an initiative we took up after the floods in Kosi River in Bihar, where a lot of people were left without any source of employment and income generation”. The organisation identified around 35 different occupations in which many people were skilled and were willing to take them up. “These were all low-cost occupations such as running a tea shop, doing manual labour, becoming a vegetable seller and so on,” she says, adding how they gave people Vapsi kits for these occupations and asked them to do some one-time work free of charge for their community. For instance, a carpenter made benches for a school; a barber cut the hair of school children free of cost and so on.
Bechan Mukhia, a marginal farmer from Govindpur village in Purnea district of Bihar was part of the Vapsi Initiative and today owns a small grocery store while also taking up tailoring work. He says, “This initiative by Goonj was good. It helped a lot of us earn regular income.” “The Vapsi Initiative is not on in Bihar at present, but people who got the kits have seen many positive changes in their lives,” adds Meenakshi Gupta. For anyone who knows Anshu Gupta well, or has worked with him, would know he is always brimming with ideas. Extremely soft-spoken and a man of few words, Gupta looks more like your average man on the street, rather than a game-changing innovator. Several names have been coined for Gupta. Some call him a bridge-maker between rural and urban communities, while others credit him with the development of a parallel cashless economy, easily replicable across the world. What stood out about this man for me is his simplicity, his ability to listen to you patiently, and that he gives you a chance if he feels you have the right intentions.
“Goonj encourages anyone who is interested in humanitarian work. The organisation looks for dedication, hard work and commitment. It’s a very open place and is focused on delivery on ground,” says Ruchika Gandhi, one of the oldest employees of Goonj, who was with Gupta in Nepal. Chatting with Gupta is always a pleasure. According to him, Goonj is not just an organisation. "It's an idea, a movement, a tool to talk, change, express and do," he says. A hands-on boss who believes in letting his employees take charge of responsibilities, Gupta also has a subtle way of overseeing matters. He believes in being on the field rather than give instructions sitting in his office cabin. The employees at Goonj also seem to be like him. They are all silent workers and believe in working rather than talking about it. They, like their boss, do not resort to ostentatious behaviour of any sort. Goonj’s strength as an organisation clearly lies in working silently without any banners or uniform flaunting it name but by valuing the wisdom and knowledge of the local people and walking hand-in-hand with them to make deep inroads into the area.
Endorsing this culture, Prof Anil K Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad says, “Goonj is one of the most authentic organisations I have come across in India. It is a true example of a very modest, very frugal and participative culture of working,” adding how it’s also an excellent business model with low cost. “Everybody is equal. From the people who give the clothes, to those who sort and pack them, to the people who receive them — the entire chain is full of respectful links. Not many supply chains are so authentic,” he says. Remembering an anecdote, Prof Gupta tells how Goonj never buys furniture for its office. The thinking is that if someone comes and feels there is a need for furniture, they are free to get it and place it there. “This is a fine way to generate empathy and this is what I call authentic work,” Prof Gupta adds.
Prof Gupta adds. The same authenticity and principles were followed in Nepal as well. Unlike many organisations whose workers roamed around in fancy cars with banners, with volunteers wearing T-shirts flaunting their organisation’s name, Goonj workers travelled by regular taxis or buses along with local partners to gather information. A simple man of values and ethics, Gupta’s first real exposure to the scale of problems of India’s rural masses was in 1991, when he travelled from his hometown Dehradun to Uttarkashi in Uttarakhand to help with relief efforts after a devastating earthquake in the region. He explained how one of the most glaring oversights in the field of development is the lack of attention to clothing. Beyond disaster relief efforts, you hear little about the need for clothes.
It’s not like there weren’t challenges, however. India is not a philanthropic country and getting people to give to the needy is a challenge. “India doesn’t have a culture of giving. Motivating the rich to part with things lying unused in their homes — and to get the poor to work to fulfill their needs instead of getting them as free handouts — has been tough,” he says. Yet today, Goonj is operational in 21 states across the country, transferring over 1,000 tonnes of used clothes, household goods, and other essential items from cities to villages annually. As this story goes to press, Gupta is figuring out how Goonj can further help in Nepal.