OTHER SPHERE
ANURAG BEHAR
15 Dec 2011
Last year, I started travelling again to
small towns and villages, an India
that I had discovered in the 1980s and
1990s. I was seeing those places at close
quarters after more than 10 years. There
were many striking and visible changes.
The most overwhelming was the sight of
India drowning in rubbish.
Standing in the exquisite Garhwal,
if you move your eyes off the picture perfect
mountains and streams, and to
the place you are standing, you will find
rubbish. The Nilgiris, the Aravalis…it’s
all the same. On the scorched plains of
Gulbarga or of anywhere else, in this
generally scorched nation, you will find
the same heaps of rubbish. Rubbish
is the common denominator of all
landscapes in India.
It’s the plastic that has done it. The
polyethylene (and similar material) bags
are the primary culprits. In a rapidly
urbanizing India, the mix of waste has
an ever-increasing proportion of such
plastic. The only way to handle plastic
waste is to have civic systems to handle
it. These are completely absent or
woefully inadequate across the country.
The plastic sets up another problem: it
also does not let even organic waste
decompose naturally.
India’s high growth rate is generating
an ocean of rubbish, for which we are
doing nothing. This is the most visible
of the many challenges posed by changing
consumption patterns and urbanization.
The McKinsey Global Institute
published an excellent study in April
2010: India’s Urban Awakening. As with
any such study that would look out till
2030, we can quarrel with many of its
assumptions and conclusions. However,
the broad conclusions are unarguable:
India will be a lot more urban in 2030;
unless we dramatically increase our
investment in urban infrastructure, life
will be much worse in cities; and the
current signs suggest that indeed things
are going to be much worse—with the
gap between supply and need of urban
services widening sharply. Urban
services include waste and sewage
disposal, water supply, transport, etc.
The study estimates that we need to
invest $1.2 trillion through 2030 in
urban infrastructure for our cities to
become livable. As valuable as it is, the
study still understates the problem. Its
benchmark estimate is of about 6,000
cities in India in 2030, which may be
much lower than the actual number.
The reasons for this understatement
are quite understandable: it is very
difficult to demarcate urban and rural
spaces, and the problem is compounded
by rapid urbanization. While
habitations may be “rural” by many
relevant measures, they may also be
“urban” by some other. Most common
is the situation where consumption
patterns move rapidly to what may be
called urban, but most other things
remain rural.
Such places do not necessarily need
all the complex civic services of a
full-fledged city, but they do need some
of the basic services, e.g. waste and
sewage disposal, water supply. When
one considers the numbers (increasing
by the day) of such habitations in the
twilight zone of urban and rural—and to
that adds all the cities (say 6,000), then
one sees a glimpse of the scale of the
problem.
It’s this scale of the problem that is
already visible in the context of waste in
its most gruesome form, of rubbish
created by plastic, generated by consumption
overtaking all infrastructure
and services. Meanwhile, our cultural
mores continue to remain apathetic to
this rapidly unfolding environmental,
health and aesthetic tragedy.
Let me propose three partial solutions
for handling this rubbish, for the cities
and the part-urban areas. I am aware
that each (or the combination) of these
solutions can be shot down, riddled
with holes of impracticality or ideology.
First is for the National Rural Livelihoods
Mission to catalyse a disposal
chain for plastic waste, including
collection, sorting and recycling. This
can be done at the satellite villages of
all urban centres. This will handle the
plastic and generate livelihood.
Second is for all corporations,
panchayats and talukas to invest in
effective waste-disposal systems that do
not end up as landfills. This would include
handling and reuse of the plastic.
The substantial investments required
could be partly funded through taxes on
key polluters such as polyethylene bags.
Third is to just shut down all units
that make bags out of polyethylene (and
similar material) or construct a targeted
tax structure that is heavily punitive.
Whatever systems we adopt to tackle
the rubbish physically, as a society we
need to tackle its roots. And for this, we
need changes in attitude and behaviour.
The apathy of producers and consumers
must be changed through education
and sensitization. Likewise, we must
bear the real cost of the use of plastic.
Governments, local and national, can
make both changes happen through
education, regulation and taxation.
This most visible of all tragedies of
our commons, at its core, requires the
same thing for its solution that is in
short supply—political will.
http://epaper.livemint.com/ArticleImage.aspx?article=15_12_2011_022_003&mode=1
Anurag Behar is chief executive officer
of Azim Premji Foundation and also
leads sustainability issues for Wipro Ltd.
He writes every fortnight on issues of
ecology and education. Comments are
welcome at othersphere@livemint.com
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