Being a change agent: Dr Vasuki

Her right hand is on the buzzer. With her left, she signs a document, nodding along as someone tells her about a transfer. Dr Vasuki’s eyes are on the door, someone’s waiting. But then someone is always waiting, they come in one after another, with requests, with answers. She patiently listens to everyone, answers, signs, makes decisions. She multitasks with no effort, or makes it look effortless.

But then the executive director of Suchitwa Mission, dedicated agency for sanitation in Kerala, has not had it easy. Her name had come out during the National Games when Kerala followed a green protocol. That was the year she joined work in Kerala. Now, two years later, she has followed the example at several places, one of the latest being the much-lauded swearing in ceremony of the LDF government in May. That was India’s first green swearing-in ceremony.

“We had the help of the Thiruvananthapuram corporation,” she says, in the few free minutes she gets in office. But she shrugs the event off as something light, compared to the struggles her team had to face at the time of National Games. “You might divide my life into two — before National Games and after National Games,” she says, laughing. Everyone had told her back then that it would be impractical, utopian or illogical.

Steel glasses used at the green swearing-in ceremony

Vasuki had to do a lot of fighting to make people understand that this could be done. This meant planting of many trees, separate bins for bio and non biodegradable wastes at all venues, avoiding plastic and flex, etc. It was a period of sleepless nights. But, she adds, she had the support of a lot of people. The swearing-in ceremony, however, was the work of one day. “It came from the top leadership and we came to know about it one day ahead. All we had to do was the implementation part. It was a physical challenge, not an ideological one.”

But the ideology behind waste management has been set for years. Attitudes were difficult to change. When Vasuki first took charge, she started with small changes. She asked everyone to start composting at home. “You make mistakes when you first do it, but you learn from your mistakes, and do it right the next time.” She wanted people to stop waiting for a move from the government for every little thing. “One could start composing with two pots. You don’t need a government subsidy for it.”

That was for the biodegradable waste. Plastic waste was another issue. “I knew as a mother how schoolchildren take lunch and water in plastic containers. I was also not aware initially.” She talks to mothers at conferences, at residents’ welfare associations, at schools where she is invited. She says how the system had managed to do this effectively in the old days, when whatever was taken from nature was given back to it. “It’d be thrown in the garden, or fed to the cows.”

The first time it struck her that she should be a ‘change agent’ was when she was a child growing up in Chennai and Andhra. By 16 or 17, she had decided to become an MBBS doctor. The next turning point came at the government hospital in Chennai. “It was one of the premiere institutions in the country, but there I came across the other side of our nation — poverty.” She remembers meeting the mother of a malnourished child and rebuking her for not feeding the child.

The woman told Vasuki how her husband stole the hard earned money to drink. These and other instances made Vasuki realise she won’t be able to address these issues as a doctor. She had to do something else. Writing the civil service was a big step. “To leave the medical profession was huge. And my husband and I were under the impression there were a lot of corrupt IAS officers, from watching so many movies,” she laughs.

But then they realised this was the best platform to do something good for the country — be that change agent she dreamt of as a child. So Vasuki and S. Karthikeyan turned IAS officers and moved to Kerala three years ago. And with their two children, have made it a home in Kerala, silently but busily running through their days, becoming the change they wished to be.