Power To The People

Anshu Gupta’s Goonj has created a new paradigm of giving, transforming lives in villages across India.

- Sanghamitra Chakraborty

IN THE EARLY ’90s, Anshu Gupta, then a young freelance journalist, used to roam the streets of Delhi in search of stories of people who remained invisible. This is when he met Habib bhai, a middle-aged man who lived on the pavement outside Delhi’s LNJP Hospital and delivered unclaimed dead bodies to the police. His cart was a moving advertisement for his work—‘laawaris laash uthaane wala’ scribbled on it. Habib bhai got paid `2 and some cloth for every dead body he handed over to the police. The winter months were busy, Habib bhai had said matter-of-factly. After all, many more homeless people died in the bitter Delhi cold— sometimes up to 10 to 12 a day.

Gupta followed him around for a whole week to understand what it meant to be a bearer of unclaimed corpses. His middle-class notions about the boundaries of what was human were shaken, but not shattered— until he met six-year-old Bano, Habib bhai’s daughter. “When it gets too cold, I go to sleep hugging dead bodies,” she had said with a bland expression. “It keeps me warm, and the best part is, dead people do not move—you get to sleep peacefully.”

Trained to be a journalist, Gupta never quite forgot what he saw and heard during his week with Habib bhai—the heart-wrenching struggles of the dispossessed for daily survival. It was often not the cold but the inadequate clothing that triggered the needless loss of lives.