He is ultimately top a life befitting his name. Bharpur Singh is a busy man. At 40, he begins his mornings by performing inspections for a waste management initiative he is a portion of. Tired from the day’s work, when he gets home, he knows he has a scrumptious home cooked meal and lots of conversations and laughter to look forward to. His parents, two children and wife anxiously wait for him to come home.
Nothing exceptional about that you’d say. Nothing except the truth that all of this was an unthinkable dream for him a couple of years back.
The similar garbage dump exactly where he proudly does his inspections is exactly where he would be huddled up with his close friends, performing drugs. He started at the age of 17. Bharpur Singh is back from the brink and it hasn’t been an quick journey.
“I was addicted to drugs at a very young age. I tried every possible drug out there – synthetic drugs, Phetanyl, smack, Charas, Ganja etc”, he shares. He was a portion of a group of 12-13 close friends who did drugs with each other. Over the years, he saw all of them pass away, one by one. And even although he was sure the similar fate would adhere to him, he couldn’t aid himself. But the habit had kicked in as well deep and he fought a losing battle for seven years. “I was certain that I wouldn’t survive,” he says.
So what ultimately helped him do the turnaround? Two twinkly tiny eyes. When his daughter was born and he held her, one thing in him stirred. “I wanted to live with my family”, he says. But that day when he spent the shagan,’ (dollars received as gifts on her birth) on drugs, he knew he had to act suitable then. He swore to himself he would quit drugs and he did.
He enrolled in a graduate course in social work at IGNOU. On the side, he began researching government social safety schemes and helped more than 4,500 of villagers (orphans, widows, senior citizens, and so on.) avail of these schemes.
Soon he learnt that the RoundGlass foundation is undertaking a waste management programme in rural Punjab and intends to clean all the village dump yards and he believed to himself that this was a sign from God, and he will have to be a portion of this initiative.
Of course the previous hasn’t left him fully but he is far better ready at handling it. “Even today I see fear and doubt in the eyes of my wife every morning, but my hard work and efforts are my response to her niggling doubts. I can never think of betraying her trust again”, he says.
Today he is an vital integral portion of the waste management initiative at RoundGlass. He has helped set up 61 waste management systems. For the previous two years, Bharpur has been working with the RoundGlass Foundation on their Plant for Punjab and Waste Management initiatives. He is a project coordinator for the Waste Management initiative and holds exhibitions to spread awareness amongst villagers about waste segregation and composting.
Bharpur is proud of his journey of de-addiction and how he’s turned his life about. “I introduce myself as an ex-drug addict. My friends in the village ask me why I’m so open about my past. I tell them I have nothing to be ashamed of as I have redeemed my past through the good work I am doing for the RoundGlass Foundation.”
He also holds discussions to seek purchase-in from village panchayats exactly where RoundGlass is arranging to launch waste management systems and manages the launch of such projects. The RoundGlass Foundation aims to launch 150+ such systems by the finish of this year and ultimately touch 12,700 villages across Punjab.