Every morning, a little before seven, Pinki Kar Deb walks down the same lane she has walked for nine years. For most of those years, this was the place where her day began with someone else’s discarded waste. 

Today, it reminds her of how much has changed. 

There is no black mound of rotting peels and plastic at the corner where the road bends, no stray dog tearing through a torn sack, no smell that makes passersby quicken their pace and cover their noses. 

The bin that stood there for years, overflowing and stinking, is simply gone.

Pinki remembers exactly what that corner used to feel like. "For a long time, this is where my working life began and ended," she says. 

"I would stand elbow-deep in mixed, stinking waste, sorting it with my bare hands because there was no other way to do it. People called us ‘kachrawala’. That word carried in it every bit of the shame the town had learned to attach to us,” she adds. 

For Pinki, ‘kachrawala’ did not describe the work she did. It described how people saw her while doing it. 

Today, she is the in-charge of a tertiary waste centre in Khowai, the small hill town in Tripura that has built a waste management system where sanitation workers run the operations themselves. She does not need a mask anymore. She sits and eats her lunch inside the centre where she works — something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And she is not an employee anymore either. 

“We are the malik (owners) now,” she says. The word carries its own weight in the cooperative's telling: the didis have gone from hired hands carrying out someone else's instructions to owners of the system they built. 

One officer’s question helped build a women-led waste system 

The story of how Khowai got here began with a question that stayed with one IAS officer: why were the people keeping the town clean the ones with the least control over their own work? 

"I was posted in Khowai, and I saw that our sanitation workers were paid meagre amounts," Nirmal Kumar, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Khowai, recalls. "They had no agency of their own and they were exploited. They were contract workers, so they were not even permanent."

He adds, “I visited the Amul cooperative, and I thought, why not make a cooperative in Khowai.” That single question became the seed of what is now called the ‘Khowai Waste to Wealth Producer Society’, registered in April and May 2026.

Turning that idea into a working system required someone who understood the science behind waste management and knew how to make it work on the ground. 

That responsibility fell to Samir Agartala, a 31-year-old waste management expert who has worked in this field since 2019 and now manages the cooperative’s work in partnership with the municipal corporation. 

"I went to Bengaluru for 90 days of practical training on Solid Liquid Resource Management at an army training centre,"........

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