What a Waste

It's everywhere, attacking your senses as you go about your daily activities... and not in the desirable way. You see it all around you, smell and taste it in your breath, wade through it as you make your way down the street and hear it gently smouldering in not so neat piles on the roadside. 

With over a billion people and no sustainable vision for the future, it seems India has no effective waste management system. When you first arrive you can't help but notice the staggering amount of rubbish clogging drains and littering the streets. Initially I thought it was due to the scarcity of bins but soon discovered how wrong I was. Their solution to the enormous amount of discarded paper, food and plastic is to sweep it into piles on the side of the street. There it sits in the heat providing a meal to a lone passing cow or a family of rats that share the pavements with the homeless. It sits there until the pile is deemed large enough then it's set alight and left to slowly burn. Obviously the smoke emitted from these garbage BBQs is toxic and not only can you see a hazy cloud hovering above the city like charras smoke but you also feel it in the form of sizable black chunks coughed up and spat out in the morning shower. 

After observing the behaviour of the local people it quickly became obvious that not only is there is no shame in the act of littering but also no guilt in the practice  of it either. Tossing rubbish out the window of moving trains and buses or onto the street when finished with the contents is normal practice and something the whole population partakes in from young to old, rich to poor, educated to illiterate. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have witnessed the blatant display of littering, and not always in a place where there are people working meticulously on these aforementioned waste piles. Some of the finer examples include a ferry trip to the 'majestic' Elephant Island off the coast of Bombay. A man probably in his early 50s siting next to me polished off the remains of his 'Midura' bottle (basically a Fanta knockoff) and without looking or giving it a second thought swiftly tossed the plastic bottle over his shoulder and into the Arabian Sea. 

The more time you spend in India, slowly and sadly, the shocking impact of this common practice begins to fade. However there was one other instance I witnessed that gave new meaning to the term 'taking out the trash'. 

Munnar is a hill station located in India's south. It is famous for its tea plantations and beautiful views from the mountains into the valleys. Whilst drinking chai at a small vendor on a quiet road amongst the clouds, I heard the chai waller call out to his daughter. She appeared a moment later and picked up a large rubbish bucket that was kept under the man's make shift sink. The young girl reefed the bucket up and balanced it on her head, crossed the road and proceeded to pour the contents over the cliff and into the valley. She skipped back across the road, replaced the empty bucket under the sink and following a look of approval from her father she disappeared. 

Casual conversation with various people over the past month has revealed some unusual explanations and justifications for the habitual dumping of rubbish, none of which makes me feel any more comfortable or willing to participate and contribute to the mass destruction. It seems to me, many higher caste people believe that the lower castes are there to serve them. Therefore they feel entitled to throw their rubbish in the street and expect people I these lower castes to clean up after them. 

Others think that by littering and having someone else pick it up creates work for people that otherwise wouldn't have any. At first this seemed somewhat reasonable as unemployment in India is staggeringly high. However after further investigation into this rationale I discovered that the people sweeping the streets of rubbish are not all doing it for the money (and would probably make more begging) for some believe this work is their duty in this life to make up for evils in a previous life. 

The most astounding and devastating thing is that not once in anything I've seen or heard has anyone any concern for the effect it is having on the environment or on their health. The entire population seems to be ignoring the fact that it's impossible to burn the discarded waste of a billion people. Inevitably, most of the rubbish will end up either as landfill or in the ocean. In fact when I asked an elderly shopkeeper if he had a bin in which I could discard my plastic bottle. He looked at me funny and directed me to a large pile of rubbish delicately stacked on the edge of Kerala's famous backwaters. When I voiced my concern that the bottle may end up in the water he looked at me in total confusion and said "Water, plastic... no problem".