Garbage is Now a Cultural Artifact in India

Last summer while driving along a forest road in rural Connecticut with my resident cousin, I inadvertently and unthinkingly tossed a banana peel into the surrounding bushes. The car screeched to a halt, and I was sheepishly made to recover the errant peel, and place it in the car for disposal later. Not that the US is a shining example of civic sterility and cleanliness, but it is a far cry from where I live.

Travel anywhere, north or south, in mountain area or crowded city, on beach stretch or forest reserve, drive along national highway or narrow country road, it is easy to see why India has been given the regrettable title of one of the filthiest countries on earth.

This is not a stray observation, an extreme or unkind position. 63 million tons of solid waste is produced annually in the country, much of it lying in mountains of land-fill outside cities. Less than 70% of it is collected and treated; the remaining almost 20 million tons are left on roads, sidewalks, railway tracks, or simply dumped on open land.

Our country has become a stinking cesspool of garbage. On train tracks, near factories, along sacred river banks, litter spreads so evenly it appears from a distance as a petrified geological layer, a thick, seemingly impenetrable ground cover of plastic, glass, cardboard and organic waste.

From Incredible India to Incredibly filthy India

You see it everywhere. Along the tea gardens of Munnar, in some of the most picturesque landscapes of the Western Ghats, in the jungles of Corbett Park, on Goa's beaches, even in the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur golden triangle of tourism’s most favoured cities – whole piles of unadulterated trash – not accumulated for collection and disposal – but just sitting there rotting in the sun.

Garbage is now a cultural artifact in India with a monumental dimension that is attracting world-wide attention. From Incredible India – a national campaign to attract foreign tourists – to Incredibly filthy India – the same tourists have posted disparaging YouTube videos of the country as the world's largest garbage dump – a live picture book of urban horror, and a scathing comment on the Indian citizen’s acceptance of it as the new normal.

Certainly levels of squalour have always been high in India, but gone are the days of small bidi packets, stray matches, and the odd onion peel by the roadside. Gone too are the days when you could escape from the dirty city into fertile and pristine countryside through narrow roads, green fields and pasture grounds to experience land and countryside in its natural state.

If big towns display filth on roads, small towns and villages allow sewage to snake through unpaved streets. Temple towns too are clean only within the religious precinct. Without exception, city, town and village are now one continuous wasteland.

Our country is home to four types of garbage. First and foremost is domestic and commercial waste that makes up the primary sight on the street and city. Made up primarily of metal, plastics and glass, it contains instant noodle packets, bottles of liquor, crushed beer cans, plastic packs of Paan Bahaar, organic waste like egg shells, vegetables, remnants of meat products, discarded cardboard and packing of all types.

Second is industrial garbage. Other than at their source, most of our rivers are mere extension of the enormous sewers that empty into them – the discharge of untreated factory waste and chemical effluents, along with a vast amount of civic garbage of plastic bags and bottles floating close to the surface. Third are the high levels of dust and dirt in the atmosphere, largely an outcome of antiquated construction practices and the absence of protective shields or other safeguards for dust containment around building sites.

Fourth is haphazard and illegal construction itself, the miles of temporary shacks and unfinished buildings littering city and rural areas. These include minor tin sheds along roadsides, car showrooms in rural areas, auto repair shops, ramshackle factories and warehouses in natural surroundings – much of it make-shift, man-made construction, visible and conspicuous, marring sightlines.

In the Himalayan foothills or anywhere else, the question isn’t whether to build a temple, a cement factory or a health spa, but whether to build at all. Even in today’s age of hyper consumption, no other country allows such a liberal absuse of its landscape.

Need for effective and urgent measures

A UN survey puts sixty five of the world’s hundred most polluted cities in India. Amongst Indian cities, Indore has been singled out as the cleanest, and Delhi, with 11,000 tons of daily waste and 34 million litres of raw sewage, as the world’s filthiest capital. In the measure of the dirtiest country, we hover at the very top, alongside Gabon and Chad.

Our pollution policy is shamelessly similar to that of the very countries that accompany us at the top of the list. At a recent conference in Geneva on plastics pollution, we were among the few countries that opposed the regulation and phasing out of plastic products. Is this a sane policy at a time when we are beating every kind of pollution record?

Without effective and urgent measures to segregate waste, phase out plastics, enforced fines and innovative methods of waste management, no amount of regulations, threats of jail terms or Swacch Bharat campaigns will clean our cities.

The mindless tossing of private trash into public space remains an unresolved cultural riddle.  Often it is hard to reconcile the contrast: a temple threshold sanitised and sparkling, seen against the garbage lining its approach; a village mud house with shining brass utensils, and against its entrance, a diseased rivulet of slime. A blinkered culture assumes the private as sacred and the sacred as private. All else can go to hell – street, city or countryside – unknown, unseen and uncared for.

When a beer can is tossed into the sea in California, it may end up a year later on the coast of Japan. But when a plastic bag of trash is tossed on a street in Dehradun it will be Dehradun's problem for a long time to come.

Gautam Bhatia is an architect. His book Punjabi Baroque will be re-released this month.

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