“WHY is India so filthy?” asks a new book called Waste of a Nation. It wasn’t always – in the old days of rural India, almost everything was biodegradable. Animals and the weather soon dealt with it. Now garbage is everywhere: in backyards, on street corners and piled up across wasteland.
True, the country is crowded. India has almost as many people as China, living in a third of the area. “Never in history have so many people had so much to throw away, and so little space to throw it,” say the authors.
But partly, they say, the filth arises because nothing is truly thrown away – someone is always there to pick it up and try to make a rupee out of it. In the process, the entire nation ends up looking like a junkyard. Waste of a Nation holds its nose and delves into the mounting piles of trash and the lives of the armies of people engaged in reincarnating it.
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Everything in India has an afterlife. Millions of Indians devote their lives to collecting, sorting, processing and selling almost anything discarded: from human hair and the world’s dead ships to plastic bottles and mobile phones. Almost every street has someone at the roadside repairing bicycles and sewing machines, or taking apart abandoned cars and trucks. Rubbish collectors shout their services like latter-day rag-and-bone men.
The cultural significance of waste is complex, and the book’s authors, historian Robin Jeffrey and anthropologist Assa Doron, explore how it plays out in ancient Hindu rituals of purity and impurity. In these, a “well-washed hand” may be spurned, and calling a lower-caste child Kachra, meaning rubbish, is said to bring good luck and ward off infant mortality.
Caste is at the root of a lot of this. It is the Dalit castes that get most of the nastiest jobs. An estimated 2.3 million Dalit women make their meagre livings by manually scraping faeces from an estimated 100 million domestic latrines and cesspits in middle-class neighbourhoods. Families fiercely defend their dynastic territorial rights to this work.
But in much of India, defecation in the open is still the norm. The bodily waste of half a billion people each day ends up in forests and on open ground, where it is a major cause of childhood diarrhoea, malnutrition and stunted growth.
Much general waste has value, and some of the supply chains are staggering. Human hair extracted from gutters by children, supplied by pavement barbers or bought from temples – where it is ritually cut by pilgrims – ends up in mattresses or woven into wigs in Chinese factories for sale in the US. One Delhi trader exports 60 tonnes of hair every month.
The economy of many shanty towns is built on handling the trash from the cities around them. In 2010, while researching a book, I visited Dharavi, a famous slum in Mumbai, which served as a backdrop for the movie Slumdog Millionaire. One quarter was devoted to lines of workshops where people chop plastic bottles into pellets, smelt aluminium cans into small ingots, re-staple old cardboard boxes, wash cooking-oil cans, mould used hotel soap into new bars and sift mounds of garbage to extract ballpoint pens, metal jar tops, toothbrushes and much else.
The tasks of handling waste in India, the book tells us, are endless and often gruesome and dangerous. Boatmen of the Ganges fish thousands of half-cremated human bodies from its waters every year. Chennai hospitals sell their medical waste to freelance dealers keen to recycle drugs and equipment, regardless of the risks. Dump scavengers, exposed to smoke, disease and the dangers of potentially lethal garbage, have an average lifespan of 39 years.
Such passages reminded me of another trip I made, this time to Mandoli, a village consumed by the expansion of Delhi. It’s now a charnel house for old computers. Down an alley filled with an acrid stench and yellow fumes, I met 10-year-old Rajesh, who had come with his brother from Bihar. He was standing on tiptoes to dunk old circuit boards into oil drums full of boiling acid. He had no goggles or mask; the acid splashed his trousers; he had an incessant cough. But the acid would liberate copper that his gangmaster would sell to a local wire manufacturer.
“India’s prime minister wants clean streets, but his vision may end up stigmatising the poor”
Waste of a Nation is an elegant and forceful examination of this underside of Indian life, hiding in plain sight on every street. It mixes slices of city life with analysis of both the cultural background behind India’s obsession with recycling and its potential role in greening a country that’s urbanising and industrialising probably faster than anywhere else on Earth.
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi wants every street to be clean, and every home to have a toilet. The authors fear this vision will end up driving the practices underground, further stigmatising the poor, for whom waste is their livelihood. It may be unachievable anyway: who will want to clean away their income?
Harvard University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline “How India got its hands so dirty”
