Hasiru Dala Innovations / elea Foundation

By providing access to markets, livelihood opportunities, and clean waste from the source, Hasiru Dala Innovations enables waste workers to aspire to more than just a minimum-wage job.

Shekar Prabhakar, Co-Founder & CEO

How Hasiru Dala Innovations creates impact:

Challenge

More than 1.5 million people in India make a living picking waste from streets and landfills. Most of them are Dalits, women, and migrant workers, among the country’s most marginalized communities. They face volatile prices, no formal recognition, and constant exploitation. Yet their work is indispensable: Bangalore alone generates over 5’000 tons of waste per day and depends on them to manage it.

Solution

HDI partners with waste pickers to deliver collection, segregation, and plastic recycling to households, corporates, and event organizers. Sorted plastics are recycled and sold to global brands committed to responsible sourcing. The affiliated Hasiru Dala Foundation recruits and prepares workers, bridging grassroots advocacy with commercial enterprise. HDI also addresses wet waste through its biogas operations, converting organic waste into clean energy.

Impact

Waste pickers become micro-entrepreneurs or employees with stable incomes and formal recognition. In 2025, HDI worked with more than 800 waste pickers. Waste entrepreneurs, who were once picking waste before dawn to survive, now manage their own teams. HDI has become one of Bangalore’s largest waste management companies.

Founders

Shekar Prabhakar spent more than two decades in India’s IT industry, including as global head of marketing at Zensar Technologies. A graduate of IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta, he deliberately walked away from that career. After teaching marketing as an associate professor and serving as a trustee of his wife’s waste-picker foundation, he co-founded Hasiru Dala Innovations (HDI) with Nalini Shekar and Marwan Abubaker in 2015 to build the commercial engine the movement needed.

The name Hasiru Dala, Kannada for green force, was chosen by the waste-picking communities themselves. Shekar and his team have grown the company into one of Bangalore’s largest waste management enterprises while keeping waste pickers at its center. Their long-term vision is for HDI to be owned by its employees – the waste pickers themselves.

elea on the board

As an active investor, we take a seat on the board – acting as a sparring partner to founders on strategy, governance, and fundraising, and keeping impact at the center of every decision. At Hasiru Dala Innovations, we are represented by our former colleague Florin Lanz, who remained on the board after leaving elea.

What strikes me about HDI is the team’s ability to keep moving forward through the complexity of informal livelihoods, municipal systems, and industrial off-take, without ever losing sight of the waste pickers.

Mauro Betschart, Senior Associate

Indumathi’s path to entrepreneurship

Indumathi started working in a garment factory at twelve. After losing her husband and facing debts she couldn’t repay, she juggled four jobs a day, collecting waste before dawn. Today, she runs dry waste operations in Bangalore, employs nearly 90 workers, and has represented India’s waste pickers on an international stage.