Images from the Arts Festival in the City of Ahmedabad

Quaker!

Rickshaw context

I'm going out of context (but recognizing it) - back into memories. But it provides context on beginnings in India.

It was motivated by coming across this picture:

This is Brooke - she is treating her bike to a new form of travel - one it hasn't experienced since its days in a box. When we came back from India from a 3 week trip working on rickshaw designing in Assam, taking science-kit flashlights to the face, Brooke and I pooled the money we didn't have to buy Indian cargo rickshaw components to make our own version back home (our luggage). In the end, a group of highschoolers worked with us to design and assemble the one above that is (aside from the Indian components) made from scraps we found in a dumpyard.

If you want to read about our trip (2010) here is the blog from where my Experiments in India was spawned. Note it has much nicer pictures than mine because (it seems) the quality of pictures has to do with your eyes more than your camera.

While we were making that one, our lab was involved in making a much ligher rickshaw design for CRD, who was looking to mass produce its model of rickshaw micro-loans. I recently found out that project seems to have shut down its plans to start in 80 towns of India, but here is a nice frame that they will never use because it is just easier to make it 40% heavier and do it the same way we have been doing it.

Day in the life of Chotawala

In August, I was asked by Waste Ventures (WV), a social business in Delhi, to look into their handcarts that were both performing and needed badly in their fledgling waste project in Osmanabad. (See earlier posts "Pune Swach Visit" and "Latur Unhooked" for earlier context). If you are interested in more context on this compedium the project lives on. This blog post documents a research method (I call it the Issueboard) I have found useful. It is essentially a real-life storyboard contextualizing a key persona and the design issues encountered. 

Here is a compilation of pictures that I made to try and help my new ICP officemates to understand the design challenges that a waste handcart faces upon moving to Osmanabad.

I am Chotawala (Small one). I live in Osmanabad, along Marwadi Gully. My neighborhood is spontaneously hilly as you can see from this picture. Many towns along rivers tend to have hilly parts, and these also tend to be the older parts of the city, as new developments are planted on flat surrounding areas.

Overnight i  sleep with a couple other chotawala's and one barawala near a water storage tank on the corner of an intersection tucked away.

In the daytime, Sumanbhai picks me up at 7:30am to collect household waste from one of the older parts of Osmanabad's city, built along the river. I was designed specially to fit through these small narrow lanes, and the alley surface is always changing from dirt to cobblestone to patched cement.

Yelling kachra as she goes, Sumanbhai draws women out of their homes to fill me up with all and any kind of refuse. Sumanbhai often leaves me to walk down nearby lanes to pick up people's trash who are too lazy to come out of their homes, or who leave it on their doorstep everyday at this time.

Sumanbhai picks out bits that are resellable, but unfortunately its mostly always mixed. The worst for me is that I have seen how people often tie up their small children's poop up in a plastic bag and toss it in with the rest. Sumanbhai usually sticks to picking out bigger plastic objects and milk and oil bags since they are some of the easiest to select without getting your hand stuck in a bag of poo.

Sumanbhai fills me to the brim and overflowing. To get more in, she'll resort to squishing it down as much as possible, but as soft as I try to take the bumps, some trash inevitably falls onto the street as we go. I heard some of the neighbors saying they don't like trash being left behind by the garbage collector. But you try and carry 50 households worth of waste (~200L = 120kg)  - its hard when your capacity is only 150L.

Then we head off to dump our waste at a transfer location for the tractor to pick it up and take it to the dump.

Being a small city (150,000+) with no centralized waste plan ever in place, Osmanabad has always relied on dumping trash on the ground in certain common areas where the tractor comes by to scoop up with hoes and small trays. During the rainy season its a muddy mess, but for the rest of the year its simply a feeding area for the street cows, pigs, dogs, and who knows what other street critters.

After a violent thrust, I need a bit of shaking and scraping to get the trash out of me. The acid residue left behind, however, is enough to continue eating away at my steel walls.

And then we head back for more. We'd like to do about 200 houses a day and that takes around 5 to 6 trips. We work until between noon and 2pm. There's no one really to be accountable to - just the 

It's only because of Waste Ventures's and Jan Adhar's project in Osmanabad that I was brought here at all. Now there is a small crew of people are rushing around trying to clean up the city. There is still no plan in place though, and they do inefficient things like spend 15 minutes emptying me scoop by scoop into the back of a truck. They say that is efficient because it avoids dropping the trash on the ground before scooping it up from there.

Sumanbhai is one of the hardest working wastepickers. She is not deterred by the dangers she faces dealing with trash, but she knows it isn't very safe, and would like to know that she is protected from any diseases she might take home to her children. She often gets things on her hands that makes her skin itchy, and cuts are common from bits of glass as she searches through the waste.

The local municipality says it is willing to help support our work by providing us with hygiene enabling  products like masks and gloves, but I don't have anywhere to store them for Sumanbhai. Also, gloves are tough to use efficiently in hot weather, and we would get cheap ones that would tear open quickly. And who believes municipality people anyways?

Technically, I was a failure - for many reasons - but mostly because I was made far away, in a rush, without taking the time to know the conditions in Osmanabad. For instance this rim was custom made to a tire that is not in supply anywhere except in Hyderabad in Pune. The wastepickers are left to make do with whatever is left, and this causes other parts to wear out in ways unexpected.

I was made from steel too thin for locals to weld without making more holes. To make it worse, everytime I am emptied by tipping over it impacts my whole frame and loosens my joints. Also, because my steel is in contact with wet organic waste, it is slowly degraded by the acids, meaning soon I will have to be entirely replaced.

The engineer had no time for calculations or testing before making me. So key parts bent with heavy loads and bad roads. Here is my swivel wheel which I depend on for maneuverability. The swivel wheel in general is not my favorite. When it's bearings wear out I am difficult to steer, and swivel wheels aren't supplied in Osmanabad. Also, when the load gets heavy, this swivel wheel wears out quickly since it bears a large percentage of the waste.

Or for instance the handle was made for someone much taller - well ok lets move past my handle - itwas just badly designed in many ways.

There's  a lot of improvement that can be made on my design, but it's much more difficult to try and make a design that is the ultimate wastecart. 

(check out the tanlines in the background)

Where the city ends

If you are in an industrial city in India, and you look up and see this

,

that's how you know the city has ended

Roads spread into cricket fields

transport continues, and these are the places where common defecation will occur early in the morning and late at night.

If you walk randomly off the city's edge you tend to find fascinating sights

like this birthday party - some 18 year old rich kid whose dad lives abroad is paying for a oversized birthday party complete with oversized pictures to remind you who is who in the 'hood.

Latur unhooked

Meet Sanjay. He is the Director of Jan Adhar, a social service organization in Latur. He is recognized as a local pioneer for innovating partnerships to make sense and cents out of waste.

Unfortunately, his projects are all shut down because his organization was outbid in the municipal tender for waste collection in Latur by a waste company from Dubai. He is organizing locals to overturn this. here they are using an adapted rickshaw and keeping wet and dry in different parts because Sanjay had been working on initiatives to turn plastics into shreddings for recycling and the organics for biobriquettes for burning in foundry. All of that is shut down now though.

The adapted rickshaw is pushed rather than cycled by the lady since she wears a saree. This version actually has a latch for tipping it back - the rickshaw has two axles in the back to allow this.

We went to visit the Latur dump. They were working on some compost acceleration liquids with a local PhD student named Sachin. That is shut down now though.

On the left is a display version of their hand-operated biomass briquette press and on the right is a machine sitting unused in the room they used to shred plastics for recycling.

The local farmers recently gained some legal ground in gaining recompensation from the local government for bringing a dump site onto their lands. Apparently some farm animals were getting sick from "leaching and airborne contamination" according to Sanjay. Here are some locals with farm animals feeding off the dump. 

Since hearing from Malti Gadgil at Swach about the issue of tranfer points for waste and allowing for segregation employing wastepickers while maintaining a waste-invisible city, I have been thinking about street presence of objects and purpose.

Pune Swach Visit

(This post happened end of August, 2011)

After being disappointed that no-one actually cared about innovation in sanitation in Trichy I rethought my plans to collaborate with organizations there. Again, I found NGOs looking for funds, grant opportunities, but having no interest in simply taking time to even consider thinking of new ideas or pathways to addressing hygiene.

So it was useful.

From there I made a long journey by bus to Pune, via Bangalore. This amounts to basically 2 days on 6 different buses (4 were intercity bangalore - and those were the worst)

I was headed there to follow a lead with Waste Ventures in Delhi to gather info and make recommendations on a new wastecart design. The hope was to also see dis/connections between hygiene and wastepickers and waste and design and technology.

The plan was to first go to Pune where Swach is a leading NGO-built-for-profit-but-supplemented-by-grants organization around wastepickers. It has been working there for a long time, and is the premier example of a large city (5 million+ i am told) incorporating wastepickers into the profits of waste collection. Their waste cart design was a big deal - made by a local university called Maharashtra Inst of Tech (MIT) and it was this design that Waste Ventures tried to take to their project site with bad outcomes.

In the end, it turns out that noone from Swach has any contact info for the students/profs who worked with them on the design. But I spent some time with a few of the door-to-door waste collectors and had a chat with the CEO about the design challenges they face - which was not mostly wastecarts, they want to find more innovative sheds for segregating.

Chai break. I spent a few hours with this crew. Hemandth is on the left. The names of the middle and the locality supervisor on the right I don't remember and didn't write down unfortunately.

After collecting from around the area, they dump it on the ground and separate it. The dump mechanism built in as a flap on the front is not being used as planned

A look at the trash.

They separated it into 2 buckets: resaleables and dump trash

They also seperated out things to take home with them. These are good shoes, bottles for liquid storage and cocunut husks which they burn in their cookstoves.

She found a half-filled water bottle and decided to wash her hands afterwards