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Former rag-picker now earns Dh62,553 every month from junk

He has set up waste segregation centres

Jaiprakash Chaudhary is generally known in the billion-dollar rag-picking business as Santu. He is 40-year-old, and is from Munger, Bihar. The last 23 years of his life have been spent in Delhi. And it has been quite a life.
Santu had come to Delhi to make a living. What the city had for him was the job of a rag-picker. Santu had no option but to accept the menial job. He was an assiduous rag picker and made about Rs150 a day. It was tough, soul-killing work spent mostly scouring through rubbish and garbage for recyclable materials.
In the mid-90s, Santu could be seen walking around Connaught Place and Central Delhi, a dirty sack on his back. He would be looking for waste that he could sell. The police and the public at the time - and it has not changed very much - identified rag-pickers as potential criminals. Tired of the physical and verbal abuse, Santu returned to his village, broken-hearted.
A couple of months later, however, poverty drove him back to his miserable job in Delhi. He opened a tiny roadside shop in Raja Bazar. This was his smelly office. He bought dry waste from trash collectors and re-sold it.
And he resold it well. So much so that, today, he sells stuff retrieved from trash worth Rs11 lakh (Dh62,553) every month. And he has employed 160 people at his two waste segregation centres in the capital.
Santu had become the hero of rag-pickers of Delhi. 
In 1999, Santu formed an organisation of rag-pickers called Safai Sena (Cleaning Army) with the help of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, an NGO that works for a better deal for rag pickers. The Safai Sena played an important role in cleaning the city and earned a reputation as a certain class of workers; not as criminals.
Santu's real life lessons and practical knowledge in collecting trash and segregating it into stuff that can be recycled have made him a sort of guru for environmentalists as well.
Santu has lectured in places such as Copenhagen, Luxembourg and Brazil on waste recycling. Alongside, he has been instrumental in changing the folks' perception of the business of rag-picking from a dirty, furtive trade to one that is essential input for environmental preservation.
It had not been a smooth journey, though. Santu had to shift his shop and waste godowns several times and rebuild them as the police pulled these down on complaints from the public that they could not live with the odour emanating from their neighbourhood. Real estate development also contributed to his frequent displacement and disruptions.
In 2012, he established his waste segregation centre in Sikandarpur in Ghaziabad, far removed from human settlements. He later set up another dry waste collection centre near the New Delhi Railway Station, a place where waste accumulated by the minute. His workforce is loyal to him. And Santu takes good care of them.
Clearly, one man's trash can indeed be his treasure too.