These days, be it groceries or gold, you can buy almost anything your heart can desire. No wonder Indian ecommerce industry is booming. However, as it goes, some of those things tend to get old & crappy or unusable. For the first kind Olx, Quikr have made a name for them. However, for those which even Olx and Quikr fails to sell and you no longer feel attached to, the only way out is the “Kabadiwala” (junk or scrap dealer).
Now the moment you are in actual need of them, you’ll have to either wait until their routine visits or go find one. From personal and many other experiences, I can safely comment that the latter is a really hard job. And if you are in luck, the next tricky part is finding the right time for both and as you finally meet, it’s really hard to get the bargaining done. Most do not have a clue about the rates (or rather no standards exist to my knowledge). So you are fooled into selling at scrap rates (yes, even scraps have their value).
Now think of this, you make up your mind to get rid of the newspaper stack (that has been piling up for last 6 months), you open up your web browser, check the rates, make an estimate, put up a request(or make a call), within the next few hours you get a call to fix the time and finally on the chosen day you end up with no scrap, zero hassles and more money. Isn’t that very promising?
Yes that’s what The Kabadiwala(the online one) does. It’s a new online portal to sell your scrap and a lots more. Services like plumbing, electricity repairs etc can also be availed via this new startup from Bhopal. Laundry pickup, computer repair, carpenter, welding services are among the upcoming services.
The collected trash is stored in designated storehouses in the city and is later sold to recycling companies. Bootstrapped with Rs 20K, this is so far how they have been financing their model and as per them, the profit margin is around 30-40%. They are also looking for investment for expansion and in house recycling plant.
However, their website looks a little amateurish but the good news is that it is due for a revamp very soon.
The startup was conceptualized by Anurag Asati and Kavindra Raghuwanshi from the frustration of similar experiences. It has been around from February 2013 and currently operates in Bhopal, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Indore, Betul, Sagar, Damoh. The next places to get these services are Mumbai, U.P, Delhi and Chattisgarh.
However, it is not the first of it’s kind idea. Similar ventures like the Kabadiwala Project shortlisted by NASSCOM, or the Sell Waste which also offers monthly schemes have been around for a while.
The target market is barely tapped so financial opportunities are endless, however, unsure. The good thing about this kind of programs is that it not only helps households to get rid of the unwanted without more frustration & the real person kabadiwalas to get more opportunities, but it also solves two most critical issues. It prevents enormous amount of landfills of garbage and helps properly optimise the recycle channel to solve the ever lurking e-waste pollution.
