Chythenyen, a Mechanical Engineering Graduate from Salem and the Founder of Kuppaikaran, is not only a proud man but also does something what most of us would hesitate to do. Yes! he calls himself a Kuppaikaran (Trash Collector), who has initiated his own socio entrepreneurship business along with his wife and his friends naming it ‘Kuppaikaran’ with a tag line ‘Love waste’.
In a special interview given to The Covai Mail, the modern Kuppaikaran elaborated on the reason behind choosing the name.
“During the final year my engineering course, I did a project on Waste Management taking Gas from the Food Wastage, which I converted as my business too. I have been doing the business for the past six years. But, when I started my business my relatives called my business as Kuppai Porukkara Tholil (Waste Collecting business), which really hurt me a lot.”
“I want to prove to them that waste collection is not something we should be ashamed of. If there is no waste collector, can we imagine how our house or street or city or the country would be like? Our surroundings will stink. Instead of looking down upon it, we should empower and embrace the waste collecting community. So, I have deliberately chosen ‘Kuppaikaran’, the very name people tend to use dismissively to refer to a cleaning job,” said Chythenyen.
He has not only inspired the people of Salem but also his friends whom he met in different social welfare organizations. His friends have resigned their jobs and now they are working as a team. The recent buzz that brought the Kuppaikaran Team into the limelight was the ‘Bogi Bucket Challenge’ asking the people of Salem to discard the clothes rather than setting them on fire on Bogi.
“We had Kuppaikaran in the conceptual stage for the past 6 months. But, when we got the novel idea of doing away with the habit of destroying everything old by setting it on fire on Bogi, we took it to the Corporation. Sathish, the Salem Corporation Commissioner, not only appreciated us but also took over the whole project and got all the Corporation Workers and other NGO’s involved in the Bogi Bucket Challenge,” said Chythenyen.
“The Bogi buckets were kept in 300 different parts of the city for collecting waste clothes from the public and the response was overwhelming. All the buckets were overflowing in just 2 days,” said Chythenyen.
The Kuppaikaran team, along with volunteers from among the Sanitary Workers of Salem Corporation, Junior Chamber International Salem Steel City and Hello Salem, has fixed a target of collecting 50,000 clothes within ten days, from Jan 10 – 20, 2018. Once the collection of clothes is complete, the clothes will be segregated into two types as re-usable clothes and recyclable clothes.
“There is an NGO called Goonj working Pan India providing refurbished clothes to the marginalized section of people like tribal and village people to whom we will distribute the segregated re-usable clothes free.
The Recyclable clothes will be distributed to the industries that will reuse them for various purposes. We have identified such industries in Chennai which will be our revenue,” said the social entrepreneur Chythenyen.
In the modern world where money is thought to be the prime objective of doing any business, a social business like this will not only help people earn money but also help society learn that there is no indignity involved in doing such a business. The Kuppaikaran team intends to do this business as an open platform where any waste collector or anyone who is into the waste module can participate.
“To our knowledge there are only two types of waste namely bio-degradable waste and non-biodegradable waste. Water waste, a biodegradable waste, which can be anything from the human excreta to urine, there is nothing that will go waste, if only we put a system in place to collect them to produce gas when they decompose,” says the waste management expert who is working with his team to create an awareness among people about linking waste removal with business entrepreneurship.
Chythenyen thanked his team members Baranitharan, the Co-founder of Kuppaikaran, who resigned from his lucrative job in Wipro to start this initiative and Harini wife of Chythenyen who is another Co-Founder, G.Mani Prakash, Kuppai Control Officer who formerly worked as Hub assistant manager in ECOM EXPRESS and lastly K.S.Gowtham, Admin Officer of Kuppaikaran who formerly worked at Voltech for their daring decision to join hands for the noble cause.
– Tamil Meganathan.