The Better India · 5 hours ago

How Wevois Labs Has Managed Over 7 Lakh Tonnes of Waste While Helping Indian Cities Improve Waste Management

A college cleanup drive in 2014 left two engineering students unable to look away from what most people prefer not to see - and that discomfort quietly became a company. WeVOIS Labs co-founders Abhishek Gupta and Abhinav Shekhar Vashistha spent a full day riding with sanitation workers before writing a single line of code, and what they heard shaped everything that followed: workers without gloves, without predictable pay, without time for their families. "Sanitation workers are the backbone of urban waste management," says Abhishek, "and from the very beginning we believed that no system could be sustainable unless the people managing it were treated with dignity and respect." Now operating across more than 36 Indian cities and reaching 46 lakh citizens daily, WeVOIS has built a traceable, technology-driven waste system that turns discarded material back into resource - while giving workers like Mohammad Rafiq something harder to measure: a salary that arrives on time, and evenings at home. What the founders understood, almost before they understood the engineering, is that the health of a system is inseparable from the dignity of the people inside it.