How to deal with India's waste problem: an interview

Book: Waste of a Nation
Author: Assa Doron & robin Jeffrey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Pages: 320 
Price: Rs 799

Indians are very clean people – any Indian household is clean and auspicious, regardless of caste or class. However, the issue is that Indians don’t see public spaces as their own – a pointer that Narendra Modi’s Swacch Bharat campaign recognised and set out to change,” says anthropologist Assa Doron. His book, Waste of A Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, co-written with Robin Jeffrey, dives into the waste management in the country, to explore the historical, economic and social aspects of the practice.

Doron and Jeffrey aren’t strangers to the country. Their previous work together, Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India, was what prompted them to take a deeper look at the waste problem. “We were working on the book when an entire industry of repair mobile phones was revealed to us. Within this industry, a lot of repair phones were dumped as e-waste, mainly around Seelampur in Delhi. I told Robin [Jeffrey] that there’s a bigger story here and we set out to investigate. This was in 2012, just before the Swacch Bharat campaign.” 

Findings from Cell Phone… laid the foundation of Waste of A Nation. If Indians don’t see public spaces as their own, then the question becomes: whose public space is it? “Only the upper classes, those who have the means and power, or the hawkers who make their livelihood there? We need to somehow generate interest in public spaces – to deem these as ours – across constituencies, castes, classes, and gender.”

Key factors to India’s waste problem

“Consumer capitalism, consumer society, population density, rapid urbanisation – these are the meta factors, if you will,” he lists. But religion plays a bigger and more prominent role since it is what labels waste as polluted and tainted. “As a result, only certain people are charged with dealing with it. Namely, ‘the untouchables’, who are a part of the reserve army of waste pickers/handlers, alongside landless labourers and poor Muslims whose lives are locked with dealing with waste.” To offer a more all-rounded explanation, Doron gives an example. “In China, Japan, and Holland among other places, human waste was considered valuable, profitable. People used to harvest human waste because it was useful as a fertiliser. But in India, this never happened because human waste is considered so polluted that the only people charged with dealing with it are people from backward classes.”

A more practical approach to deal with human waste must be implemented, where the locals are involved. “We have to get over with the social stigma that it is only someone else’s problem and not mine,” he says.

In August 2017, around the time that Akshay Kumar released Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Twinkle Khanna took to Instagram to share her woes about running into someone openly defecating on the beach on her morning walk. “Good morning and I guess here is the first scene of Toilet Ek Prem Katha part 2 #WhenYourWalkGoesDownTheToilet (sic),” she had written. 

Overcoming social stigmas won’t happen overnight either. These will come with providing solutions that work fluidly in the local ecosystem. “Solutions need to be suitable to the local climate, social environment alongside education and an understanding of the implication for open defecation. It is a multipronged approach.”

The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation claimed that by the end of 2017 around 59 million toilets had been constructed since the start of the program in 2014. However, news reports have suggested that some states may have inflated the number of toilets built. Reports have also claimed that some big states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have made little progress and others are not spending money on information, education and communication activities to motivate rural households to use toilets. This highlights that the challenge is not only one of constructing enough toilets, but also one of overcoming cultural barriers to their use.

“To use toilets, one has to clean and maintain it. Who will do that? People are so stigmatised for even having a supposedly ‘dirty’ space like that of a toilet in their house premises.”