Nature - Gold in your backyard!

by Jamuna Rangachari

Daily dump, a creation of Bangalore-based Poonam Kasturi, enables everyone to make compost at home from household waste

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The smell of earthy, organic manure is absolutely wonderful,” says Sukanya Ananth, who has been making compost for over two years in the urban environment of Bangalore. Like her, many customers vouch for the empowering experience that Daily Dump offers to the urbanite who often feels helpless at the sight of the reducing greenery on one side and his own inability to do something.

This is exactly what Poonam Kasturi sought to address, with a dream that every Indian home composts its waste. Not one to stop at dreaming, she went on to research, studying the subject, and working out the design.

When asked, “How did you come up with the design?” she says modestly “I did not find it, it found me. I was on the road asking various questions like most people, questions about how best to occupy one’s time, what real quality is, the difference between impact and transformation, and then Daily Dump happened.”

Looking at the big picture, she thoughtfully adds, “Waste (like water, education, equity and dignity) belongs to all of us. We cannot abdicate responsibility only to the politicians, lobbyists, or big corporations. As our home waste is 50 to 70 per cent organic, keeping this off the streets can reduce the mess on the streets by 60 per cent.” Practical and realistic, she is convinced that while technology has its place, composting is a natural process that has been perfected by the universe.


Composter Poonam Kasturi with the Mota Lota on the left, and the Kambha on the right Quoting the distinguished systems theorist Russ Ackoff, she says our globalised world has all along been “doing the wrong thing righter.” “The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. This way we learn and actually get righter. Most of our current problems are," he says, "the result of policymakers and managers (and designers) busting a gut to do the wrong thing right.”

With Poonam, doing the right thing right came after many steps. When she recognised the dangers of plastic, she shifted to terracotta, which already has a traditional presence in India.

“Lots of people have shaped it in many ways, so this project does not belong to me alone – it belongs to the many that will shape it as time moves on. This project therefore is dedicated to everyone who wishes to do something with it – and all the material is available on this site under a creative common licence,” she says. At a time when meditation masters are taking out patents, it is refreshing to find an open-source method for knowledge dissemination – of drawings, communication material and business information, enabling those interested to freely clone the model.

She is equally open-fisted on the subject of competition, observing, “The rate at which we are messing up our cities, there are not enough of us to clean up!”

With Daily Dump now present in six cities, in just over three years, she is certainly doing her bit.

Contact: Daily Dump
2992, 12A Main, HAL 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 008.
Phone: + 91 80 41152288 , Mobile: + 91 99164 26661
Email: dailydumpcompost@gmail.com, pbkasturi@usermail.com , Website: www.dailydump.org