GARBAGE TO GOLD

Working as househelp at a garbage dealer's home in Delhi set him off on a journey back home in rural Kashmir, cleaning up its roads and rivers, giving locals employment and processing the collected waste for recycling

- KALEEM GEELANI

The roads and water bodies leading to Gadihama, the last, and perhaps remotest, village of south Kashmir's Kulgam district, are strikingly clean. Starkly different from the Valley's other rural parts, no garbage meets the eye as one cuts through jampacked apple orchards and finds the crystalline Aharbal waterfall feeding into the Veshaw river, the biggest tributary of the Jhelum.

It's not as if this idyll escaped modernity. Rather, it was restored to its pristine self via the labour of 36-year-old Tariq Ahmad Ganie, who has taken it upon himself to make public spaces in Kashmir free of the garbage and scrap that had been accumulating for years. On a bumpy road lining a stream in Gadihama, Ganie's garbage processing unit, spread across a little over two kanals of land, processes nearly two quintals of garbage each day. Over the course of a month, this amounts to more than 300 quintals, which he sells to big firms so they can recycle it into new products.