The Chennai-based startup Kabadiwalla Connect, which connects neighbourhoods with their local scrap dealers, may be only a few months old, but the foundation for the project was laid several years ago, when founder Siddharth Hande was a student at the city-based, Loyola College. “I had set up an organisation called Reclaim Our Beaches with a few of my friends and it became popular. It was the first youth organisation of its kind, which propagated cleaning up beaches and so on,” explains Hande. “It was filthy,” he continues, while remembering the clean up campaigns. “People used to come to the beaches and dump all kinds of waste there.” But the data analyst learnt the limitations of the exercise when he realised that the waste that they managed to clear off ended up back in the environment. 

Siddharth Hande