After more than ten years of work GOONJ channelises all different kind of underutilized household material from the cities to the villages of India but our focus has and is highlighting and addressing the basic but ignored need of clothing. Donating clothes is the oldest form of charity; an activity that has been happening at an individual, or sporadic level in every part of the world.
GOONJ has primarily introduced the following value addition to this work:
- Introduced systems in the entire process, right from collection to distribution.
- Unlike other similar efforts on a small scale meant for a limited target audience, this is a nationwide intervention. It stresses more on education and replication rather than providing a physical product forever.
- Turned old cloth into a resource from a charity.
WHY CLOTHING
Clothing is normally associated with
- Disasters: People mostly give their old cloth at the time of disasters but the fact is that more than half of this country doesn’t need a disaster to be helped. The fact that we still have organizations like salvation army, Oxfam etc collecting clothes for distribution indicates that even in the developed countries there is still a segment which needs clothes. Therefore it doesn’t take much to understand the need for cloth in developing or underdeveloped countries. Plus there still isn’t definitive data available on how many people die every year of cold/winters, similarly there is no assessment of the problems women go through due to use of dirty cloth as sanitary napkins during menses. For people going through the annual disaster of winters every year or women who don’t have enough to cover their bodies and face the monthly disaster of menses, cloth plays a critical role.
- Development: Cloth is normally seen as a charity and not as a resource for development. Half the country needs help primarily because devlopment resources are very limited, becoming almost non existent at the level of far flung villges. This initiative is channelising precious resources from the cities to the villages. It is filling gaps in the areas where the grassroots organizations, given their limited resources or funding based restrictions are not able to address. It is not only supplementing their efforts but more critically value adding to their work.
- Dignity: Since cloth is always associated with charity or donation, it presupposes a donar and beneficiary relationship, which automatically neglects the receiver’s dignity issue. People in the cities normally always give what they have and not what is needed by the beneficiaries, this is especially true at the time of disasters. We understand that Cloth for anyone is a synonym of dignity. For a women, having a clean cloth available at the time of menses allows her to deal with a basic need in a dignified manner. Even in the development sector, when one goes into a village, one visible indicator of poverty is considered how the person is dressed and what is the quality of cloth (dirty/clean or rags/new clothes).We are keenly aware of this aspect of clothing and that’s why a big part of our work is on spreading awareness among the urban masses about sensitivities of giving vis a vis the cultural, social, climatic aspects of the beneficiaries. This is also an important aspect of our sorting, packing and distribution work.
Measurement of Need
Worldwide Cloth is considered one of the three basic needs, thus trying to measure it would be stating the obvious. What does merit attention here is that despite this obvious, across the world, when millions are spent on women’s reproductive health, sanitary napkins for poor women, to address a basic need which connects very deeply with her reproductive health, doesn’t find any mention in any health budgets. The fact is that issues right from global warming to domestic violence are considered important but clothing, a basic need, isn’t acknowledged as a subject or an issue at any forum.
Some facts
- 170 million, two thirds of India’s 300 million population living in rural areas is poor.
- India will have more than 40 per cent, i.e. over 400 million people, clustered in cities over the next thirty years (UN, 1995). Modern urban living brings on the problem of waste, which increases in quantity, and changes in composition with each passing day.
- India will probably see a rise in waste generation from less than 40,000 metric tonnes per year to over 125,000 metric tonnes by the year 2030 (Srishti, 2000).
- Major cause of rural poverty is the lack of resources and opportunities resulting in a growing chasm between the rich and the poor.
- Environmental pollution caused by waste material is a macro level health hazard in most cities in India. Yet, the socio-cultural and the techno-economic angles of the issue do not receive the required attention at the appropriate levels of planning and implementation in the country
GOONJ has taken the prevalent features of rising income levels, consumerism and space constraint in urban India and instead of looking at it as an indicator of the increasing gap between the two ends of the society, constructively utilized the results of one to address the ills of another.
