At the time of publishing this piece, Dr. Bapat was the India Lead for Public Sector Governance at Oxford Policy Management. Her latest article, 'Moving with Rags: India’s Second-hand Clothes Recycling Trade,' published in South Asian History and Culture by Taylor and Francis Routledge, was based on her work under the Inlaks grant. We spoke with her to know more about the piece, the process of publication and learnings, as well as her future plans.

Can you tell us about your recent publication? What is the idea behind the volume and what themes does your paper explore? 

Gender and the garment manufacturing industry-led textile economy are historically intertwined, especially how women's roles in the industry have shaped in recent decades. The special volume brings together authors offering unique insights into the South Asian textile/garment industry from the vantage point of factory workers and socially engaged artists whose work critiques worker exploitation, factory managers, heritage textile makers, and traditional recyclers of discarded garments. An edition that lies at the intersections of gender, labour, and textiles in contemporary South Asia raises a few questions—How is women’s textile-based labour valued in South Asia today? How are women negotiating challenges at work, and what support systems advocate for them?

My contribution in the volume offers insights into the industry that is born once the garments are discarded to make their way to landfills. This is fuelled by consumers’ mercurial appetite for the latest must-have garment, leading to the culture of fast fashion and wastefulness in the Global North. Through an ethnographic study, I visit the lives of members of India’s nomadic, tribal Waghri Chindiwalli women, a community that has built livelihoods out of discarded second hand clothing (SHC) for generations. I explore the SHC value chain and the precarity of the Chindiwallis’ informal work, absence of trade formalisation, and lack of access to support systems.

What were some of the insights you gleaned during the process of researching this piece? 

My research with the Chindhiwalli community and the textile waste value chain stems from an ethnographic study conducted in 2015, spanning various Indian cities including Mumbai, Vadodara, Ratlam, Nagpur, and Hyderabad. I am a qualitative researcher at heart and have consistently used methods such as transect walks, key informant interviews, and group discussions. For a social scientist, it is the community that is her lab, and hence the methods demand immense flexibility, sensitivity, and precision. To deeply immerse myself in complex community and street market settings, I would squat with the workers at the street vendors market to sell a few bales of clothes, walk miles with women on their daily Pheri and travel with them to outstation village markets in their preferred modes of transportation—trucks, lorries and small tempos.

While exploring the nuances of the Chindhi trade, I was further intrigued about the forward trade linkages of the international SHC industry. With support from the Inlaks Research and Travel Grant, I explored the journey of discarded clothing from the Global North, and its influence on the SHC industry. For three months, I conducted interviews and industry visits of SHC units in London, Brighton, and Oxford. I attended car boot sales, street-clothes markets, and interviewed staff and clients of various charity shops of OXFAM, Cancer Research, and British Heart Foundation. I discovered historical archives of Waghris at the British Library which matched the oral narratives shared by community on their inter-generational trade patterns. This discovery was indeed my Eureka moment.

Could you tell us about your professional journey so far? What are the various ways through which you have integrated your research with practice?

Post my DPhil, over the years I have worked at the intersection of academia and public policy to influence thinking on urban governance, informal livelihoods—especially on waste-based sector. I got an opportunity to work closely with the National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NULM), Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India (GoI) to design convergence led policies between India’s largest sanitation mission (i.e. Swacch Bharat Mission-urban) and NULM for communities whose livelihoods are dependent on waste recycling and sanitation. In 2020-21, I was a core member of the Ministry’s team that led the design and implementation of PMSVANidhi—GOI’s flagship scheme supporting street vendors whose livelihoods were affected by COVID-19 and the subsequent national lockdown. I worked closely with senior policymakers and helped develop a focused understanding of the street vending ecosystem, their livelihood patterns, and associated challenges. We created listings and conducted national level surveys of various street vendors—often assumed as a homogenous category, to further link them to social security benefits.  These were rickshaw pullers, chindhiwallis, human hair collectors, cobblers, food vendors, etc. This initiative resulted in the first ever national comprehensive documentation of the street vendors' community in India. I was also appointed member of a national committee constituted to review the provisions of The Street Vendors Act, 2014, by MoHUA, GOI and as a working group member (Livelihoods) at the National Commission for De-Notified Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes, Ministry of Social Justice, and Empowerment, GOI, where I got the opportunity to capitalise on lessons learnt from my doctoral work.

You are currently the India Lead, Public Sector Governance (PSG), Oxford Policy Management (OPM). Can you tell us a bit about what you do?

As a PSG-India lead at OPM, the key insight that underpins my leadership approach is that strong governance systems are at the core of any policy design. At OPM, we support governments, multi-laterals, bi-laterals, and foundations across the policy cycle on governance centred issues such as capacity strengthening, institutional design, and decentralisation. We support policy design and provide critical insights to help our partners adopt a comprehensive approach across all stages of the policy cycle: from design to implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

To cite an example, I am currently leading a project with a Foundation engaged in closely supporting India's textile waste economy. This Foundation promotes ventures related to textile waste, waste entrepreneurship, and aims to professionalise workers involved in the textile waste economy. We're in the process of developing a framework for the Foundation to guide its overall strategy in integrating informal livelihoods of communities traditionally dependent on textile waste with innovative ventures and technology-based investments in the sector.

What are your plans going forward? What ideas would you like to explore?

Going forward, I plan to leverage my learnings, leadership, and existing national and global networks to support thinking and dialogue on urban informal livelihoods. We often tend to work in silos across and within academia, government partners, civil society organisations and private players. To break this siloed approach, my broader goal continues to be at places where one can push the needle for convergence-led thinking.