SIVASAGAR, June 11 (PTI): As a teenager, Bipul Kalita, a former self-styled lieutenant of the banned ULFA, had once tried to cleanse ills of society with guns but after coming back to the mainstream, he is trying to clean up his hometown Sivasagar as an entrepreneur dealing with garbage.
In his mid-fifties now, Kalita had once chased the dream of the proscribed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) for around 12 years to establish a ‘sovereign Assam’.
He gave up arms in 2000 and has since settled into family life with his wife and two daughters at his native place Sivasagar in the eastern part of the state.
After doing some jobs for the first few years, Kalita chose to be an entrepreneur in 2016 and started a door-to-door waste collection venture with seven-eight partners.
“We started the garbage collection work in the 14 wards of Sivasagar town. We also undertook an awareness drive about proper waste disposal in Dibrugarh.
“Though we were a group of seven-eight people in the beginning, most left the venture as they didn’t consider it as an appropriate job. I continued with it alone with my NGO ‘Rupantar’ and soon received help from six other civil society organisations,” Kalita told PTI.
In Assam, NGOs are engaged in door-to-door waste collection in urban areas.
He now has seven vehicles and several employees, including the drivers and other associates, with the task of garbage collection and disposal.
“We also have 20-25 women working with us. Besides garbage collection, we have two machines for turning waste into manure. These were given by the Sivsagar Municipal Board,” he said.
The suppliers of the machine had come from New Delhi and trained Kalita and his team to convert waste into manure, but a chemical needed for the process has to be sourced from the national capital, which has been a problem for them.
“Financial crunch remains the biggest challenge” for the militant-turned-entrepreneur as his venture is dependent only on the nominal monthly charges collected from households and commercial buildings.
“We get Rs 60 per month per household, of which we pay Rs 10 to the municipal board. Commercial buildings pay a little more in terms of monthly charges but we have to give 50 per cent of it to the board.
“Our appeal to the municipal board is to waive the tax so that we can get some more margin,” he said.
Kalita is not one to be dissuaded from hardships and hurdles, having spent several years, as a member of the outlawed ULFA, in tough terrain and constantly on the run.
“I was influenced by a neighbour to join the ULFA in 1986. I was about 17-18 years of age then. The ideology propagated by the outfit seemed correct then,” he said, recalling the immense difficulties endured by the cadres as they trained and camped in the Kachin province of Myanmar.
“Many boys died even before reaching the training camps. Unknown diseases afflicted us and there were no medicines. Yet, we sustained and returned to Assam after three-four years. Counter-insurgency operations were intense then, but the popularity of the group was also high.
“People from different sections of society helped us in many ways. But later, the ‘secret killings’ proved to be a big blow for the organisation,” Kalita claimed.
Secret killings in Assam referred to the killing of relatives, friends and sympathisers of ULFA militants by unidentified assailants in the late 1990s.
When Kalita left ULFA in 2000, it still had some “popularity, but once most members of its ‘central committee’ came overground between 2008 and 2010, people’s confidence eroded and popularity decreased”, he claimed.
“Time has changed now. When we took up arms, it was a different age. We have been now following the peace talks between the organisation and the government, but except for a few visits to New Delhi, nothing has happened,” Kalita rued.
The negotiations are going on between the government and the pro-talks factions of the banned outfit but the hardliner group led by Paresh Barua is yet to come for peace parleys.
The Barua-led faction was named ULFA (Independent), following the split as the majority of the top leaders of the outfit came forward for talks.
ULFA (I) had announced a unilateral ceasefire following Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s appeal for peace talks in 2021.
“Many like me did not get any financial support from the government after our surrender. We hope that the administration will be sympathetic and will help us,” he added.
