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)