The Dragoness of Bagalur, that’s what Almitra Patel's family used to call her when she was younger. A more unlikely tyrant there never was. But you would be wrong to underestimate her gentle benevolence, for Almitra knows how to get things done. From her lovely, old-fashioned farmhouse somewhere along the road to Bagalur, where she stays with her giant Alsatian, Almitra builds schools all over South India at her own cost, plays mother and nurse to the villagers who live nearby, and is a member of the Supreme Court Committee for Solid Waste Management.
Almitra and her husband moved to Bengaluru in 1972, to set up a factory. “I wanted a house outside the city, where my kids could have pets and room to grow up,” says Almitra. “Back then, Lingarajapuram had a bar, a bakery and a bangle shop, in that order of social priority,” she laughs. The Siddharth Education Society in Tumkur had teachers to educate children in Kothanur, but no proper school building. Children were taught in living rooms and verandahs that belonged to generous households. “We built our first school for them. It had 12 rooms and was built by a brilliant man who used only traditional methods,” Almitra recalls.
The demands of this new calling increased manifold: they built toilets and a storeroom for one village school, they added a primary school to the first construction too. In 2008, Almitra put up a 15-room block with an attached open stage. The rammed-earth construction used soil from the basement next door along with stone quarry dust and very little cement. “Leftover soil usually ends up on the highway, which we didn’t want,” she explains. The 19,000 square foot school is believed to be South Asia’s largest earth-rammed structure.
Almitra says she understood the value of education when growing up. “My parents took charge of an ailing school near Nasik, which my mother ran until four days before her death at the age of 90,” says Almitra. “We have grown up valuing education.”
Almitra has built a school in her father’s memory at his birthplace, a small fishing village near Mumbai.
Living on the outskirts of Bengaluru, Almitra’s family and all the nearby villages found themselves facing a terrible menace: Garbage. The municipalities would dump their waste just outside city limits. This attracted swarms of stray dogs that quickly formed packs and returned to their feral roots.
“The dogs would slaughter sheep in broad daylight, they killed 624 chickens in our poultry farm in one night because the boy forgot to look the door,” says Almitra. The roads became so unsafe after dark that farmers would walk home in groups to protect each other from the dogs.
The turning point came when, one day, an official arrived on her doorstep and said to her, “Why are you complaining about garbage? Magadi road is much worse.” According to him, the regular landfills had long since run out of space and requests for new areas were strongly opposed by the builders’ lobby that was afraid that land prices would depreciate.
Around this time she met Captain Velu and learnt of his model of door-to-door collection of dry waste so it could go to rag-pickers. Wet garbage would be turned into compost that would go back to the soil and fertilise it. In 1994, Surat was struck by a plague, caused by garbage and the unforgiving monsoon rains that flooded the city.
“We got into my van and for the next 30 days, we drove from one city to the next. We covered 30 cities all over the country to propagate the door-to-door waste management plan,” she says. Almitra has visited 152 cities in India since the year 1994. “For a five kilometre distance outside the city, you’re in no man’s land,” she says.
Municipalities have their hands tied by the fact that they cannot buy land outside municipal limits, so the matter of dumping garbage was left to the State Government. That’s when Almitra made her way to the Supreme Court to get some direction on waste management. “We wanted funds for waste
management, which we received,” she says.
Her newest pet project is waste minimisation, where people are taught to separate waste into what’s useful and what’s not before they dispose of it. She is also making tiny solar lamps that she intends to supply to un-electrified areas and also to relieve loadshedding. “I’ve already supplied these to the nomads in Gujarat,” she says.
Thus, the little old lady with snowy white hair and a disarming smile rushes about like a whirlwind. “My husband and I had more money than one needs to live on, so I do this,” she says simply. In a world rife with bad news, where human suffering is made into a media circus, where people have learned to bask in their neighbour’s misery, it is heartening to find the good there is, too.