Why am I Fundraising? 

Do you know that there are people still working for less than 50 rupees per day and struggling very hard to make their ends meet? Do you know the proportion of people working in India slipped and share of unemployment ticked up and this is much greater in women due to various family obligations to study or work?

What would you do if you found out that all of the trees in your state were scheduled to be cut down? Or your city's main water source was slowly being contaminated? Or maybe that your condo sat atop a waste dump? Would you move?

Although government mediums are playing their part in disseminating information and generating employment opportunities, not all members of different ages and sex are able to equally get livelihood opportunities , and a physical space where any woman from the community could come to discover new skills, could learn hands on new clean technologies, work for their livelihoods, get together with others on creating a platform that will ensure the economic generation coupled with safeguarding the environment, and mainly catch the fun of creation ranging from daily use technology to producing recycled product from the waste is one felt need. We are working on the same as part of our initiative.

Speaking of Our philosophy, it could be summarized by a statement: Creating Utilities that care for the environment and society. There are still women who face obligations to study or work. They are in a position unable to come out of their houses and neither can find jobs because of their poor education background. We will address this by using small technologies which can be used by women very easily and can utilize for continuous economic generation by the women.

What do we do?

We are working on small clean technologies which can address the problem of livelihoods among women who have various obligations and also save the environment by using effective recycling and reusing of Waste as a resource.

We are working on manufacturing of incense sticks/agarbattis/dhoop sticks from the floral disposals procured from the temples with various process modifications and by employing Women. The incense sticks manufactured in this way are pure and without any chemicals and as a result are not harmful to humans.

We call these floral disposals as floral bio-resource and thus in a single sentence    “We are turning the Waste into Resource and Empowering Women as Environmental Change Agents”.

How do we do?

The above products are manufactured by employing effective reusing and recycling of waste. We employ women in the process of manufacturing of the products. These women are otherwise unable to take up regular jobs due to lack of education and family responsibilities. These women are from low income groups and this project would add an additional income for them. 

We form Self Help Groups (SHG’s) with women and they are given training and workshops on how to make incense sticks from the floral bio-resource. They are supervised in each process right from procuring the floral bio-resource to making of final incense sticks and selling them in the market after packaging.

Why do we do?

There are few aspects of the society that are hugely neglected. The first concern we are serving is helping lower middle class people raise their living standard and secondly trying to make use of garbage for making a product. This has a huge impact on society and environment which simultaneously improve the standard of living of the women and her family.

We have completed our proof of concept and are now planning to expand our reach and reach to larger set of beneficiaries. 

A believer of Ecofeminism, Preetham Gampa is a student of Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Kanpur.

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