In the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, a group of women are creating manure from regular household trash as part of the Swachh Bharat Mission.
For the past seven years, they have been gathering trash from their homes and other homes in the neighbourhood and combining it with cow dung to create manure. In 2017, their group received national government recognition in New Delhi.A cheque for Rs. 1 lakh was given to them as congratulations. A woman, Sheela Kushwaha, stated, “We are a group of 10-15 women and we have neem doing this work since 2015. We collect household garbage such as vegetable peels, used tea leaves etc. and mix it with cow dung all together for decomposition. After that we used it as manure in our fields and sold it to farmers. There is no need to apply chemical medicines in the field. It is sufficient and gives better yield. We also earn a good profit from it.” “Besides, we received some amount from the government in our self-help group and we all invested it in our different works like a few women invested in sewing machines and some in growing vegetables etc. We all earn around Rs 2 lakh a year from this,” she added.
However, the locals said that the work that these women were performing was admirable. When necessary, they also remove the women’s manure.