How a ragpicker became a changemaker | India News

Ten years after successfully concealing her life as a scavenger from friends at school, on a sweltering summer afternoon, K Rajeswari was busted. A reticent 15-year-old then, Rajeswari had spent a good part of her childhood leaving - quickly and stealthily – after school, to join her mother to pick garbage for about four hours. And on some lucky days, head to the slaughterhouse to fetch the bounty of bones that always fetched a fortune.But on this day, she walked back just in time for the school bus to pass, and the peers and teachers she had worked so hard to befriend, discovered that part of her life she had worked as hard to hide. Today, Rajeswari is 47 years old, a practising Buddhist and Ambedkarite. She is also the founder and president of All India Intellectual Property Rights SC/ST Association, under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and the first woman to head an employee association at a national level. Every time she looks back at the incredible journey, one of the childhood experiences she believes launched her on a riot to realize one unthinkable breakthrough after another, is that day after at school, when she walked into the classroom, and the kids joked loudly that the air smelled of trash. medium78292149In some ways, a deluge of such incidents that had left her cornered and desperate, also pushed her to join the football team, and become a member of the first international football tournament held in Chennai in 1994. "The game helped me release pent up aggression and also relied on my skills to observe my opponent before making my best move - an instinct that has stayed with me in every other endeavour."In 2016, following her association’s seven-year-long fight against a dodgy reservation policy, 459 SC/ST and OBC vacancies were filled for gazette rank officers for the very first time in her department.“For years, they had claimed that not a single SC/ST candidate was eligible – something I refused to buy into," says Rajeswari, who soon discovered shocking discrepancies in the reservation roster. “By the end of this fight, I was a lone employee sitting on a hunger strike inside the office for about ten days. Isn’t it ridiculous that you have to put your life at stake to get something you're entitled to?” she asks. medium78294470Today, the exhilarating smile of victory lights up Rajeswari’s eyes before it reaches her lips, as she leads an intellectually nuanced, and gritty anti-caste resistance in her workplace and the slum in Pulianthope where she grew up and chose to stay back, despite being entitled to a bigger, government quarters home.“When I was a child, a man who saw me wandering with the garbage bag, offered to buy me tea and cake – food of the gods for me, considering most of my meals were leftovers scavenged from the bin. As barter for his sympathy, he tried to stake claim over my body,” says Rajeswari. “It was at this point that it hit me; the disadvantage wasn’t that of being born in the margins, it was in succumbing to a system that broke you enough to ensure you remained there and resigned to it,” she says. medium78294484And that is why, her vein of activism lies in wearing her roots as a badge of identity and using them to shift the narrative, disempower privilege, and reclaim power positions and equal access to resources. “I live in Pulianthope to demonstrate to my community's children that they can imagine both growing up here and finding government jobs if they work hard enough, and to prove that a life beyond these demographic boundaries is possible,” says Rajeswari, who’s funding school for about 15 kids. “After hours of garbage picking, as we returned home - my joints screaming for rest and my feet sore - my mother would make me sit on the floor and study aloud for two hours every day. No matter the circumstances we were born into, she knew this was our chance to a different future,” says Rajeswari, who finished her B.Com through distance education and is now halfway through a law degree. "We need to keep the focus, get this done for ourselves, and pass the baton."