“Earlier, I used to roam all day. Some days I would earn enough to take food home; some days I would come back almost empty-handed. Nothing was fixed,” says Dharma, a 39-year-old waste picker who migrated from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi. He pauses before adding softly, “And most of the time, people did not treat us with respect.”

“For the longest time, I was facing difficulties in finding work,” adds Ayaz Khan, another waste collector. Their words reflect a truth long buried beneath the noise of urban life.

In the vast, pulsating heart of Delhi, where millions of tonnes of waste move silently through the hands of invisible workers, the people who perform one of the city’s most essential roles often remain the most poorly treated. 

Waste collectors, many of them migrants, walk door-to-door under the punishing sun, knocking on gates, waiting outside homes, and sifting through discards that fuel India’s recycling economy. Their labour keeps neighbourhoods functioning, yet their earnings are unpredictable, their schedules unstable, and their dignity frequently overlooked.

The problem goes far beyond an individual experience. India’s waste ecosystem is largely informal, with millions of workers depending on inconsistent daily hauls. A successful day can feel like luck; a bad day is simply swallowed and survived. Rates fluctuate, weighing is often opaque, and collectors travel long distances for uncertain returns. 

It is into this fractured system that ‘Finobadi’, founded by a 20-year-old college-going entrepreneur from Delhi, has stepped in with a promise of stability, clarity and dignity.

Finobadi’s founder, Karan Kumar, did not grow up imagining he would build a recycling company. His story begins in a humble home in Delhi, born to parents who had moved from Samastipur in Bihar in the 1990s. His father had studied only up to Class 5, yet started a small perforation workshop from scratch.

“Watching my father build a livelihood with almost nothing taught me that perseverance can turn emptiness into opportunity,” he tells The Better India. “Everything I do carries the values I learnt from him.”

Karan was always drawn to the inner workings of things. He dismantled irons, remote-controlled cars, broken electronics, and anything he could get his hands on, then put them back together. 

“I was endlessly curious. If something was not working, I couldn’t sleep until I figured out why,” Karan says.

By his early teens, he was shadowing local electricians, memorising their numbers, observing how they diagnosed faults, and even mediating service calls. He built a small informal network. He would take wiring or repair requests from neighbours, then pass them to electricians he trusted, earning a small margin, before attending his afternoon classes in school.

Then came the pandemic.

When COVID-19 lockdowns began, and his father’s........

© The Better India