A Look At How The Waghri Community, India's Invisible Recyclers Give A New House To Old Clothes

Meet Radha Ben, a 'bartan wali' who goes door to door, calling out to people, and asking for old clothes in exchange for utensils and other household items like a plastic water tub or a laundry basket. This trade was handed down to her by her mother.

There are thousands like Radha Ben across India. They frequently visit societies and housing complexes, apartment buildings and colonies, once or twice a week; collecting old clothes in exchange for utensils or other household goods. They are the Waghris - a nomadic community - who have been operating this informal, often invisible old-clothes recycling trade for more than a hundred years now.

Once criminalised, the Waghri is a denotified community but the stigma of being considered criminal remains. The word Waghri itself has negative connotation In Gujarati and so members of the community consider both Waghri and Chindiwali as derogatory terms. They prefer to be referred to as Devipujaks or Deviputras.

There is a process of bargaining involved as Radha Ben negotiates the amount of clothing she wants in exchange for the utensil she is about to give away. Usually, she asks for more than just one bundle of clothes, which means over 10-12 pieces of old clothes in exchange for one utensil. Sometimes, customers even ask for specific items that Radha Ben then sources for them.

Radha Ben then sorts all these clothes at her place of dwelling. Once the sarees, jeans, trousers and shirts are all sorted and placed in separate piles, they are ready to be taken to the Dilli Darwaja Bazaar where these clothes will be sold.

Ahmedabad's Dilli Darwaja market is the city's largest market for second-hand clothes. Hundreds of women from the Waghri community gather here with the clothes they have brought from their daily pheris to sell them to local vyaparis or middlemen. These clothes are further sold in local weekly markets.

The Waghri trade of recycling old clothes has many businesses associated with it. The utensil shops, where the women buy utensils from. The shops of plastic household items that are also used by the women in exchange for old clothes. Then there is the transport business - the autowalas or tempo walas who help transport large quantities of clothes to and from the marketplace.

The Waghri community survives at the bottom of the pyramid, India's second-hand clothes market. But they are a critical part of the textile waste value chain.