Dealing with dirt

     

The sun is blazing hot. The stench is overpowering. The men and women were dressed in rags with a maroon waistcoat which distinguishes them as contract workers, not regular employees. Many of them appear to have crossed the normal age or state of health to be profitably employed. They are busy sorting through mounds of garbage which have just arrived in small trucks from the living quarters nearby. Many of them don't wear gloves as they shift all organic waste to huge pits. Cows and buffaloes are grazing nearby, trying to find something to eat from the garbage.
  If you want to know how lucky you are, I'd invite you to stand near these mounds of garbage where humans sift through the stuff that we throw away. Try to do that for about an hour in one week. Your world view will undergo radical changes. There are men and women, teetering on the edge of existence, segregating plastics, glass, cloth, styrofoam, aluminium packets etc from the large amount of food waste and other stinking rot that we throw away from our homes. 
       Two years back, in the workplace, we decided to segregate garbage into bio-waste and recyclable. This involved pressing the services of hundreds of contract employees to wade through the muck and clean a huge mound of garbage.  Earlier all that unsorted garbage had grown into a mini-mountain over the years, spreading its stench for miles and also igniting fires of its own volition. This attracted stray dogs, cattle and vicious criticism from a bunch of disgruntled employees living in the vicinity. At the end of a one month effort, this whole mound was demolished and we made pits to convert bio-waste into compost and sought the help of local authorities to dispose off the plastic and other solid waste.

   That’s when I had an inkling of something called garbage terrorism in our midst. The local authorities refused to take our garbage for disposal. Although they could not legally refuse. The municipality/ corporation said you deal with your dirt. You can’t dump it in our garbage yard. We were looking for solutions to deal with this huge stinking problem. We were told that there are dealers who are ready to pick up plastic and other waste. Meanwhile we kept the plastic and other waste tied neatly in big garbage bags and stored it in an old dilapidated building. The dealers came, took a look and said all that plastic will need secondary sorting and washing before they can take it for processing. That was an impossible task to carry out with our resources. We finally told the conservancy contractor to deal with it and dispose it off safely.

     So the contractor would take all those big garbage bags to the municipal dumping yard in the dead of the night to escape attention of municipal authorities and come back mission accomplished. In the Chennai Corporation controlled premises, the conservancy workers would often go on strikes that would lead to accumulation of garbage in the streets. Residents show their protest by dumping garbage on the front yard of the house where elected representatives live. In our over populated cities, garbage handling and availability of water are slowly growing into major going to be crises which are going to explode in our faces.

       Prosperity brings its own problems. And when there are too many people crossing the line of poverty, they are able to afford mobile phones, packaged food, white goods etc, all of which come in packages which are then thrown away. A new mattress is bought and the old one thrown away. Old non-functional mobile phones are given decent burial as new models take their place. Plastic bags, empty water bottles and many layered chips packets are strewn everywhere.
           And there is frenetic pace of construction going on everywhere in the city. This results in a lot of debris strewn around. The building contractors do not know where to dump them. One could see them dumped in the dividers of highways. It is such an unpleasant sight as one travels around. Isn't it possible to demarcate areas in each block for dumping construction debris?  A building contractor I knew told me that he pays off people to take away the debris and dump it surreptitiously in open areas in the dead of the night so that  future owners of the luxury apartment are spared the unseemly sight of it.
    Yeah...and what do we do to protect the interests of the scavenger class? Ask the politicians. They have passed a clutch of legislation banning manual scavenging. They have passed several acts for protection of contract labourers. Still scavengers die cleaning septic tanks very frequently. And the contractors  who employed them are arrested and thrown into jail for a few days to the cacophony of huge headlines in TV/print screaming about it. The position of contract workers who deal with garbage are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are addicted to alcohol. Can you blame them? After handling our garbage, they have to eat food. (Believe me, if you stand anywhere near these places, you can bid goodbye to your appetite for a long time till that memory and the stench lingers) We could invest in technology for cleaning sewages and septic tanks. But no....that requires a lot of managerial skills, coordination, planning, financial resources etc. Passing an Act in the Assembly or Parliament is the lazy man's easy way out. Throwing the contractor in jail might even fetch some votes. But nobody wants to go anywhere near those mounds of garbage to have an understanding of the problem its totality. We could make a difference from our small household by segregating the garbage. Start a small composting pit or a bin. We can make life a little easy for these forgotten souls who have to then segregate this garbage that we throw away.. But we are too busy aiming for the stars. We have bigger problems to deal with. Let us shut out that dirt from our lives
   I write this out of frustration. After trying so hard to make a small difference in the place where I work.