You have pizza delivered at home and you can also have your grocery carried home on call. Now to add an environmental benefit to home delivery service, an inspiring group of IIT Kharagpur students are successfully running “Kabaadi on Call” – mobile app-based service that lets you call a garbage collector home at your convenience.
The solid waste management and recycling service is available in Kharagpur town – in and outside the varsity campus.
The service launched by students’ entrepreneurial venture called Gain Waste Solutions is steadily gaining traction in the Kharagpur, where people can call a garbage collector home through an app on their phones and have the solid waste segregated at source, which makes recycling easier.
Generally, like it happens in other parts of the country, all kind of waste is dumped at one (or more) identified dumping grounds. Picking out various kinds of waste from the heaps for trash is very difficult for garbage pickers, as a result of which India is home to some of the largest landfills in the world.
Kabaadi on Call was started in 2014. Gain Waste has ‘hired labourers to collect recyclable waste from residential areas.’ The garbage collector approaches a caller’s home with a weighing machine and rate card for all types of wastes. The garbage person collects everything from dry waste to plastic. While dry waste is recycled at the company own vermicomposting plants, paper goes to paper mills for recycling and plastic and other waste is sold to vendors for a nominal price.
According to Phd student, Director and Co-founder at Gain Waste, Abhimanyu Kar, since inception of the service, they are selling recyclable garbage upwards of Rs 20,000 every month. Kar said;
Till now most of such waste used to land in Gopali landfill at the edge of our campus. It created pollution and there were problems in segregating organic and recyclable waste. Now things are improving.
Idea of Kabaadi on Call
Main objective of the service is to clean the environment by collaborating with local authorities.
The waste collected by door to door garbage collectors is classified by density. Organic waste with least density is recycled in one of the 30 vermicomposting plants (Gain Waste is granted 1/3rd acre land in Gopali) outside the campus. Paper with higher density is recycled at paper mills and other wastes are sorted and sent to scrap dealers.
In addition to recyclable waste, the company also collects organic waste from dustbins around the IIT campus, which is recycled into manure.
Including Kharagpurians, many professors of the IIT are frequent users of the Kabaadi on Call service. Sudha Goel, professor Civil Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, regular user of the service informed;
I call them (Kabaadi on Call garbage collectors) and they come at a time which is convenient to me. They take away everything which is recyclable and not just newspapers. I also get better rates.
Scientists at IIT Kharagpur recently developed a low-cost arsenic filter which visions to provide safe drinking water at 3 paisa per liter.