H.V Gayitri

Proud daughter of a decorated Army Officer who was also a freedom fighter and social reformer.

Worked in fashion marketing & merchandising for about 27 years, connecting markets in more than 30 countries with leading exporters in India. Also, taught in premier institutions for 10 years, such as NIFT Gandhinagar & NID Ahmedabad, NIFT Bangalore and ALT Training College, Bangalore.

Pushed beyond the comfort zone of a job and jumped into the development sector. After about 8/9 years of learnings from setting up livelihood projects -with Self Help Groups, and with Gram panchayats in safe drinking water sector- founded Waste Impact, a Trust, in 2014.

Today, Waste Impact Trust facilitates the development of open-sourced technologies to benefit entrepreneurs of disadvantaged communities through creating platforms such as Hackathons. Waste Impact Trust runs series of REimagiNEWaste Hackathons in collaboration with renowned institutions such as Indian Institute of Science, India Institute of Management Bangalore, Ramaiah Institute of Technology Bangalore and COMDEKares.

We have conducted 6 hackathons with various themes on the waste eco system. The USP of these hackathons is that the communities which are managing waste such as Waste Pickers, Manual Scavengers take part in it along with the more fortunate of us to find sustainable solutions to day to day problems faced in managing waste. The sustainable solutions emanating from REimagiNEWaste are developed and incubated to become sustainable, social, inclusive enterprises. We have now about 6/7 solutions being incubated.

Since 2021, we have been working on creating zero waste, sustainable army campuses and have successfully completed 6 residential and 1 (Pioneer Corps Training Centre) regimental campuses in Bangalore, Misamari Assam and Gopalpura Odisha. As a part of EMPRI ( Environmental Management and Policy Reasearch Institute) have conducted a number of campaigns for schools in Bangalore on waste and waste management.

There is a lot more to be done. It’s a war which we all have to fight together.