Transition…..

There’s a little bit of pain in every transition, but we can’t let that stop us from making it. If we did, we’d never make any progress at all – Phil Schiller
As a city Ahmedabad is trying very hard to bring systems in place as far as waste management & traffic is concerned, and they had been impressive in doing so.
On the other side of coin, as city is getting better managed, the decline in access to waste for rag-pickers was felt for sometime now. So, the fortnight was dedicated to understand the next course of action for Paryavaran Mitra.
At one end, we met some pioneers of the industry taking their inputs, while on the other we started our alternative skills program of making paper bags as a pilot with few women. We are glad to have mba students of Nirma University helping us on this. As always, they first visited the community, interacted with our mentors, made the papers bags themselves. Now, they will start sharing about the concept and try to get some recurring orders ensuring continuous livelihood for PMs. We also have Tridibesh bhai (University of Exeter student), a volunteer working on alternative skills for couple of months.
Keeping the shift in perspective, our upcoming center has been planned as a model center for Integrated Waste Management where PMs will be involved both in waste collection process as an authorized stakeholder as well as in recycling process as a major value addition strategy.
In regular activities front, we are happy to share that we got YMCA on board with us to support in our journey. Like other hotels, they will be donating their dry waste to us to support our cause. Gratitude to Sunita di & Vandana di for encouraging us.
We also organised an eye camp at Manav Mitra center where nearly 110 community members were checked and 92 will be given glasses.
All in all, it was good learning fortnight..
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