Who let the trash out?

Virushka’s brush with ‘litter man’ Arhhan Singh is a reminder that every bit of waste makes a mountain of garbage. But the problem is not one individual, it’s the culture of not owning up to the lack of civic sense. It’s time we took responsibility for our own trash, says UMANG AGGARWAL

Complex cultural, social, political, and religious hurdles keep India from managing its waste effectively, a Harvard study argues. A derivation from this culture is a certain sense of smugness and guiltlessness about poor waste disposal habits. And that misplaced feeling of entitlement is something that even education has not been able to counter completely.

Twitter recently saw an example of the ignorance that arises from this very culture.

On June 16, Virat Kohli posted a video of wife Anushka Sharma scolding a man in Mumbai for throwing garbage on the road through the window of his car. The post said, “Saw these people throwing garbage on the road and pulled them up rightfully. Travelling in a luxury car and brains gone for a toss. These people will keep our country clean? Yeah right!!! If you see something wrong happening like this, do the same and spread awareness.”

And the man’s reaction to the post shows how reluctant we, as a society, have become to own up to our own trash. Using the small quantity of the trash, the fanciness of his car, and slippery fingers or a blowing wind to his defence, he said, “So I happened to carelessly litter a sq mm of plastic while driving! A car passing by rolls their window down and there we have our wonderful Anushka Sharma ranting and yelling like a crazy roadside person! The garbage that mistakenly went out of the window of my luxury car… was way less than the garbage that came out from your mouth… From (yo)ur luxury car’s window… Or the trashy mind Virat Kohli to shoot and post this online… For whatever gains…Now that’s some SERIOUS TRASH!!!”

The man, Arhhan Singh, has been identified as a minor celebrity, who has appeared in movies starring Shah Rukh Khan and Shahid Kapoor. Soon after his agitated post, his mother came to his defence through another long post on Twitter.

Proper waste disposal is a problem that metros and remote tourist spots have been struggling with alike. Unacknowledged, tiny pieces of garbage, which escape the current understanding of social responsibility in the nation, might explain why.

A mountain range of garbage

When you have deadly mountains built up of your mistakes at different places in the country, it’s time to start practising the art of feeling sorry. Koode ke pahad or mountains of hazardous waste actually make for landmarks in areas like NCR’s Okhla, Bhalswa, and Ghazipur!

These can be found across cities and hill stations, along with reports of them having caused one accident or the other. In 2016, Mumbai’s Deonar landfill erupted in fire, covering the city in toxic smoke.

The Ghazipur koode ka pahaad recently got some extra attention because it literally fell and killed a couple of people. On the nation’s 69th Independence Day, the Bhalswa landfill near GT Karnal Road was chosen by the people working there as the site for hoisting of the national flag to draw the Capital’s attention to the problem right under its nose.

Bomb Guard near Diskit Tsal, where all the garbage from Leh is dumped, the Dhapa landfill in Kolkata, the Boragaon landfill in Guwahati, and the garbage mountain next to the bridge connecting Kasarwadi with Pimple Gurav in Pune are some other examples.

These mountains have been “built by an average 100,000 tonnes of waste a day,” a Harvard report argues. They are made up of everything from leftover toiletries and medical waste to food waste and sometimes even dead bodies. The garbage mountains across Indian cities are overfull. There have been repeated cases of landslides, road accidents, and even fire because of these. Mumbai’s garbage mountain is believed to be perennially on fire. NCR’s Ghazipur garbage mountain oscillates between being on fire and collapsing to hurt or even kill civilians. The stench that rises from these is the mildest — and yet quite deadly — of the problems. Imagine the health hazards to the people who make their living out of sorting waste on these mountains and even live near them.

Trash doesn’t just flow out of one’s hand and onto the street. And the off chance that it does, nobody stops them from taking charge, picking it up, and disposing it of to aid sustainable development.

SOCIAL STATUS VERSUS GARBAGE

It’s believed that in the traditional Indian society, kabadiwalas or waste pickers or ragpickers had the critical role of managing trash efficiently. But in the urbanised society, this has been twisted and somehow tied with class and caste roles. The idea of someone who is at a ‘lower position’ in society picking up our waste behind us is a part of the culturally shaped habits of individuals.

The fact that Arhhan Singh felt the need to bring up his luxury car twice in his post is telling. It’s almost beneath someone who is financially comfortable to think about waste disposal. It has made them practically apathetic towards waste disposal and management. An inherent sense of it being very much everybody’s job is missing. It is relegated to the ‘lower classes’, which are expected to work for bare minimum wages or often even for free. Ragpickers make money mostly on the basis of luck — if they find something valuable while sifting through garbage.

So for some regular, financially comfortable men and women, thinking about segregating waste and making sure that it is disposed of in an environment-friendly manner, is simply not a concern. And when one doesn’t have to worry about it at home, one doesn’t quite think about it on the streets either because someone who needs the money will take care of it.

If one reads between the lines of Arhhan’s post, it shows that the embarrassment arises not out of having been caught doing something irresponsible and selfish, but out of the man’s ‘social image’ being questioned.

The fanciness of one’s car or clothes or shades has nothing to do with the basic responsibility of not littering. But that arrogance and lack of ownership of the waste one produces comes from the idea that it’s someone else’s class role to manage it. Doing it themselves doesn’t quite fit in the bandwidth of this understanding of social status.

As Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey argue in Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, “Waste is often not sorted at source.” They say that 90 per cent of unsorted waste is simply dumped onto the ever-growing dumps and it has become the traditional role of waste pickers to do all the dirty work. It’s pretty evident that the lack of an inbuilt sense of accountability towards keeping the environment clean runs through individuals, families, and societies that rely on ragpickers in an unsaid and unacknowledged way.

The INHERITANCE OF TRASH

On Pinterest, user Tammy Lynn has posted an anti-littering quote which asks, “Why are you littering,” with four options — all of which are ‘checked’. Those are “I’m stupid,” “I don’t care about my city,” “Mommy still cleans up after me,” and “all of the above.” For many in India, that is certainly true. Think about it — traditionally, who deals with trash in most families in India? Waste pickers and ragpickers often provide door-to-door service in apartment buildings in cities. But even there, it’s usually the mother who takes the garbage bin to the door to empty it out in the waste picker’s larger bin. Children are often not trained or even ill-trained when it comes to waste management on a day-to-day basis. And on the streets, it shows.

Responding to Virat Kohli’s post, Arhhan Singh’s mother took to social media and wrote, “Violating basic rights to privacy and you shamed my son in the video as well in your post content; you both may be who you are in your fields, with millions of followers and all the PR backing you… As a mother, I would like to state that you have not only shamed my son @arhhansingh on social media by not blurring his face, but you’ve also exposed him to unwanted hostility... How dare you?? Use your voice to urge the municipal authorities to take action. This is morally and humanitarianly very wrong. You may be Anushka Sharma or Virat Kohli in your house or on screen and the field, but on the streets you are just a citizen trying to correct another... Do it with kindness... fear karma. And just FYI, he did not react badly, not because of who you both are; we couldn’t care less, but only because he has a decent upbringing.”

The problem is not one individual. It is the culture of simply not owning up to the lack in one’s civic sense that runs through individuals.  What makes our ideas about littering so mixed up and confused as a society? Smugness about littering is not fine. How can talking politely, being rich, or your trash being supposedly wayward justify it?

While there were many who supposed Arhhan, one Facebook user, Dharminder Salwan, responded to his post by saying, “Sir, I feel your embarrassment and shame. But the best you should do is apologise and move on. In case you are not aware, littering in public places is punishable under law... be thankful you have not yet been fined for your act.”

Another user, Krupasagar Sridharan, wrote, “Face it, if it hadn’t been a celebrity who had posted a shaming video, we’d have all been on the side of whoever posted it, because that’s become the way society does things now.”

And yet, in this particular case, it was escalated to the extent of Arhhan Singh sending Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli a legal notice for shaming him publicly.

SOLUTIONS OFFERED

In 2014, the BJP Government had introduced the Swachh Bharat campaign. Across colleges and residential societies, it had made quite a mark. Celebrities sporting a broom had become the trend. In the same campaign, Shilpa Shetty is one of the latest names on the list. She has been sending out messages through billboards, radio and TV channels to educate people about the importance of waste segregation. In one such ad, she calls up a regular grocer to chastise him about ignoring the heap of garbage right in front of his store. She goes on to advise him to have it removed lest people start shaming him. Soon, a bunch of kids holding placards gather around to say: “Sharmaji, shame shame.”

This choice between “aas paas ki safai” (keeping the surroundings clean) and “izzat ka kachra” (being shamed publicly) is quite clearly offered by the Government-led campaign. Keeping that, and the steady growth of the BJP Government’s cleanliness campaign in mind, Virat Kohli’s post seems to be quite appropriate. Government and NGO-led campaigns like Chakachak Pune, Come Clean India, and Clean Arunachal have been launched in the past.

However, they can’t do much until individuals learn to feel shame instead of looking for ways to defend themselves against it. Blaming tradition is, again, too thin an argument. A mindful approach is all that is required.

To quote Christina Yang, a character from American TV show Grey’s Anatomy, “Being aware of your crap and overcoming your crap are two very different things.” Indians have got to do something about the trash; it has to be kept off the streets and in the bins, where it belongs.