Every morning, a little before seven, Pinki Kar Deb walks down the same lane she has walked for nine years. For most of those years, this was the place where her day began with someone else’s discarded waste.
Today, it reminds her of how much has changed.
There is no black mound of rotting peels and plastic at the corner where the road bends, no stray dog tearing through a torn sack, no smell that makes passersby quicken their pace and cover their noses.
The bin that stood there for years, overflowing and stinking, is simply gone.
Pinki remembers exactly what that corner used to feel like. “For a long time, this is where my working life began and ended,” she says.
Pinki Kar Deb once sorted mixed waste by hand at the same roadside corner where the bins have now disappeared.
“I would stand elbow-deep in mixed, stinking waste, sorting it with my bare hands because there was no other way to do it. People called us ‘kachrawala’. That word carried in it every bit of the shame the town had learned to attach to us,” she adds.
For Pinki, ‘kachrawala’ did not describe the work she did. It described how people saw her while doing it.
Today, she is the in-charge of a tertiary waste centre in Khowai, the small hill town in Tripura that has built a waste management system where sanitation workers run the operations themselves. She does not need a mask anymore. She sits and eats her lunch inside the centre where she works — something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And she is not an employee anymore either.
“We are the malik (owners) now,” she says. The word carries its own weight in the cooperative’s telling: the didis have gone from hired hands carrying out someone else’s instructions to owners of the system they built.
One officer’s question helped build a women-led waste system
The story of how Khowai got here began with a question that stayed with one IAS officer: why were the people keeping the town clean the ones with the least control over their own work?
The women once sorted mixed waste outside homes to show families how much time poor segregation cost them.
“I was posted in Khowai, and I saw that our sanitation workers were paid meagre amounts,” Nirmal Kumar, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Khowai, recalls. “They had no agency of their own and they were exploited. They were contract workers, so they were not even permanent.”
He adds, “I visited the Amul cooperative, and I thought, why not make a cooperative in Khowai.” That single question became the seed of what is now called the ‘Khowai Waste to Wealth Producer Society’, registered in April and May 2026.
Turning that idea into a working system required someone who understood the science behind waste management and knew how to make it work on the ground.
IAS Nirmal Kumar’s visit to an Amul cooperative inspired the idea of a women-led waste cooperative in Khowai.
That responsibility fell to Samir Agartala, a 31-year-old waste management expert who has worked in this field since 2019 and now manages the cooperative’s work in partnership with the municipal corporation.
“I went to Bengaluru for 90 days of practical training on Solid Liquid Resource Management at an army training centre,” Samir says. “I learnt systems that cities far bigger than Khowai use to manage their waste, and I came back because I wanted to bring that here. We work in partnership with the municipal corporation, but the didis run the system. My job is to make sure the science behind it does not break down.”
100 didis and a town that learned to sort
Today, a hundred women, known to everyone simply as didis, run the entire waste ecosystem of Khowai. They arrive before the town fully wakes up, sign their names in a register, pick up their routes, and begin the work that keeps every street running.
From there, they split into teams: one for door-to-door collection, one for segregation at the ward centres, one for the tertiary facility where final sorting, baling, and packing happens, and one that moves through the town in a truck, picking up any waste left in public spaces to keep Khowai genuinely bin-free.
The town’s 15 wards are served by seven secondary segregation centres, each covering two to three wards, before the waste reaches the tertiary centre that Pinki now heads. Door-to-door collection is led by Uma Rani Deb Das, whose team visits every household each morning. At the tertiary centre, one man works alongside the didis, helping with baling and heavier tasks. He is hired and paid by the cooperative itself.
Every day, the didis collect nearly 1,500 kg of dry waste and around 3,000 kg of wet waste, with the amount rising slightly on Mondays. A municipal survey of 4,500 homes recorded a similar figure, with Khowai generating close to 4,300 kg of waste daily.
What makes Khowai stand out, cooperative officials say, is that it became the first city in the northeast to introduce secondary segregation at this scale.
The didis helped households divide their waste into three categories using bins they distributed door to door. The waste is then sorted again at ward centres and finally at the material recovery facility, where it is packed and sent for recycling or reuse.
Waste management expert Samir Agartala returned from 90 days of practical training to help build Khowai’s system.
The town now has six material recovery facilities, each processing 300 to 400 kg of waste daily, along with a micro-composting centre with 55 pits that can process up to five tonnes of wet waste and produce around 500 kg of compost every day.
This transformation began with the didis helping people understand that waste segregation had to start at home. They went door to door with leaflets, visited schools and colleges, and showed families why separating waste mattered. Their belief was simple: when children learn a habit, they often take it back home to their parents.
“We used to segregate their waste right in front of them,” one of the didis explain, describing how they would sit outside homes and sort through mixed waste by hand while families watched. “We showed them exactly how much of our time was wasted doing what they could have done themselves in a minute.”
That moment changed the conversation around waste. Families who once saw garbage as something that disappeared after leaving their homes began seeing the people who handled it. The didis also organised field visits, bringing residents to the centres to understand where their waste went after collection.
Today, more than 90% of Khowai’s households segregate waste at source.
Around five households still do not comply and face a penalty system. Of the households that initially resisted, three have since started following the practice.
‘Now, we don’t need any masks’
For Pinki, the change is not measured in numbers or percentages. It is measured in how her days feel now.
The cooperative has turned sanitation workers from contract employees into decision-makers and owners of the system.
She is 39 and has spent nine years in this work. At home, her husband and two daughters have watched her move from being someone people avoided to someone the town respects.
“Earlier, all the waste was mixed and dirty, and we had a very tough time segregating it,” she says, remembering the years before the cooperative existed. “Now our days are very different. Earlier, people were not ready to do this work, but now there are didis who are more than ready. Earlier, we couldn’t even sit in the centres and eat, but we had to. Now we don’t need masks, and we can eat peacefully in that centre.”
Before the cooperative, sanitation work in Khowai paid barely Rs 3,000 a month, an amount Pinki describes as a majboori (helplessness), something people did because they had no other choice.
“We are earning about Rs 3,500 now,” she says. The cooperative has begun rolling out small increments every month, and the money goes directly into each didi’s bank account, with no middlemen taking a cut along the way.
The word kachrawala remains part of Khowai’s memory, but it no longer carries the same stigma for the women who do this work. “Earlier they were called ‘kachrawala’,” Pinki says. “Now after realising that we are making money, we have dignity. And more people are asking to join and take up these jobs.”
The cooperative now receives regular enquiries from women who want to join the system, a striking shift from a time when few people wanted to take up this work.
How waste workers became decision makers
What sets the Khowai model apart from many sanitation schemes across the country is the question of who actually holds power inside it.
In most cities, decisions about routes, timings, and priorities are handed down from the municipality to workers who simply execute them. In Khowai, that decision-making now sits with the
The cooperative runs its own toilet cleaning unit staffed by two permanent workers. Wherever heavy lifting or baling machine operation is required — work usually associated with men — the didis hire and pay men through the cooperative itself. Every level of the operation, from the ward centres to the tertiary facility Pinki runs, has a manager, and every manager is a didi, promoted according to her qualifications and experience.
The daily truck rounds for stray public waste have cut roadside accumulation by roughly 90% since the cooperative took over.
Even the old roadside bins are gone now. In some places, they have been replaced by small shops run by street vendors supported by the cooperative. Each vendor is required to keep a dustbin and segregate their own waste. The didis work in rotational shifts on Sundays too, ensuring that no corner of Khowai is left with piled-up waste.
Little of the town’s waste actually goes to waste anymore.
Vendors take what they need for recycling, and the rest is ground down and handed to a contractor who uses it in road construction. Discarded clothes are washed, treated, and often stitched back into something wearable by the didis themselves.
Schools and colleges became important stops in Khowai’s campaign to make waste segregation a daily habit.
A typical day runs like clockwork: door-to-door collection from 7:00 am to 10:00 am, segregation from 10:00 am to noon, and centre cleaning, counting, and packing from noon to 1:00 pm, a rhythm the didis have made entirely their own.
‘It’s not garbage, it’s wealth’
Back at the same lane where the old roadside bin once stood, Pinki no longer remembers the smell or the shame that once surrounded it. She sees a clean street, a passerby who no longer needs to cover their nose, and a group of women who have transformed the work they were once looked down upon into something they own.
The didis of Khowai have a word for this change. It is not kachara (garbage), they say. It is sampatti (wealth).
Because in Khowai, the women who once handled other people’s waste are now building value from it, on their own terms.
