Livelihood
Live Projects
Access To Education Urban Livelihood & Microfinance
Nidan, Bihar (2004), ($89,000)
Nidan was started in 1996. Nidan felt it was important to facilitate a broad based movement for recognition and implementation of rights of informal sector workers. Thus Nidan got engaged in organizing vendors, hawkers, home-based workers, rag pickers, construction workers, domestic maids, agricultural workers etc by taking up the issue of legal rights of these workers. It has also taken up the cause of ‘Right to Shelter' for the poor. Nidan promotes the savings habit among its members, and make credit accessible to them through Financial Institutions, both government and non-government.
Nidan, through AIF support, is working with rag pickers and sweepers for strengthening and dignifying their livelihood. The sweepers and rag pickers are now called “Safai Mitrs” which means “friends of cleanliness”. With AIF support, Nidan has collectivized them and the collective is now registered as “Swachdhara”. The objectives of the collective are mainly to promote enterprises of rag pickers and sweepers by upgrading their skills, and to convert the waste into alternative useful products. The project also has a strong element of sensitizing the urban population to help these “Safai Mitrs” do their job well, by segregating the waste at a household level. The sweepers and rag pickers have green uniforms and fixed working hours with tea and lunch breaks. “Swachdhara” has a vermin compost unit and a paper-manufacturing unit, which uses the waste collected from households. Both the paper and the vermin compost units are doing well, and are able to get orders from the market.