Second Best: Where Thrown-Away Clothes Sell For Throwaway Prices

GHODA MANDI: Recycling Prevents Tonnes Of Items From Ending Up At Landfills

- Priyangi.Agarwal @timesgroup.com

New Delhi: Before the break of dawn, 40-year-old Vijay gets busy sorting piles of clothes at Ghoda Mandi in west Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar. He folds clothes and sorts them into bundles — shirts, pants, kids wear, sweaters, saris, kurtis — in the dim light of his simple mobile phone. He surveys his wares: a toddler’s T-shirt for Rs 1, an adult’s shirt for Rs 5, trousers for Rs 10, saris starting at Rs 20 and going up to Rs 60.

“We sell these secondhand clothes to traders who supply them to hawkers at flea markets and factories across the country,” smiled Vijay, a member of the Waghiri community, known across Delhi for bartering household utensils for old clothes. “These pieces may eventually sell for as much as Rs 600, but they are available here for, say, Rs 50.”

As a Waghiri, selling clothes at Ghoda Mandi has been his ancestral family work, said Vijay. Ghoda Mandi, so called because of its location near the Ghode Wala Mandir, is bustling with life rather early in the day from 4am to 9.30am. Most of the sellers are members of the Waghiri community, who offer discarded clothes that they have gathered from colonies in Delhi and neighbouring districts. Some of them wash, dye or iron the garment before putting them on show at the market, but most simply offer the clothes as given by households in exchange for pans and dishes. They usually barter clothes for steel utensils, but with people’s tastes changing, they now also carry plastic and glass items for the exchange.