A MESSY STORY OF WASTE
It’s a legitimate question: why is India so dirty? Undaunted by the complexities of waste in India, historian and writer Robin Jeffrey and anthropologist Assa Doron team up again, to write this book. It’s a 360 degree appraisal of India’s waste crisis—broken into seven chapters. Researching a significant breadth of writing and data, they conclude: there’s a lot of waste in India because we consume differently and more; we are also more numerous; the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, they believe, hasn’t quite cleaned up India; the caste system continues to bear the brunt of urbanisation; and people are key. So, what’s new?
For one, a lot of data and reference—the chapter notes and bibliography are a hundred pages—that build the picture of the new, consumerist middle class whose waste is strewn across the country. Despite many surprising absences, I quite enjoyed this usually ignored section. The data is valuable, though it also left me wondering if the authors used the data unquestioningly as long as the sources appeared kosher. How did they triangulate important numbers? They peg the number of people picking and recycling trash in Delhi at 300,000. I would put it at half, based on multiple sources. What made them pick this source? I couldn’t figure out, and while they mention the miseries of data accuracy, they also, on occasion, turn victims of the phenomenon.
By weaving mass urbanisation into shifting consumer choices, DoronJeffrey make the case of waste much richer. It isn’t just about people picking convenience or enjoying being wealthier. The case of shifting to toothpaste and brush from datun gestures at the residual tension even in such consum er choices—pollution versus purity, in this case. You see the footprints of frugality washed off, yet embedded in the consciousness of many.
Some of this is undone by the sweeping, often perceptionbased, generalisations. Sample this: ‘India’s recycling economy has long existed; it is innovative and subversive; and although it is constrained by its cottage industry structure, it is propelled by flexibility.’ What shall we make of this? How should we unshackle recycling? Doesn’t the sector already metabolise optimally? At another place, they allude to repair and reuse as a sort of hallmark of Gandhi, silencing both the context of the man and the life conditions of millions globally, mostly without agency. Sometimes, the analysis is facile. On why there isn’t a robust change in many Indian municipalities: ‘For an IAS officer, being a municipal commissioner is something you do for 2 or 3 years...’ But isn’t that the case with everything the IAS does? What makes the temporary nature of posting for administrators a cause of failure in one sector but success in another?
Books create space for authors to lay out their perspective, even if they sometimes start pinning gold medals on people in the form of patronising burra sahib descriptions: ‘the most committed and knowledgeable advocate’, ‘an authority on these matters’, and my favourite—‘if only, if only (while advocating for more goodies for NGOs)’. By the end, I made peace with these, because they usefully indicate the authors’ peoplecentric politics.
When a book is full of lofty truisms, one begins to miss critical enquiry of the kind one expects of serious scholars. No one piece of work can meaningfully speak of everything. Yet, if one is trying to understand why India’s detritus is smeared across its landscape, surely the nature of the new Indian city—as it is emerging and becoming the focus of all physical land use, masterplans and local area plans—deserves attention?
Who is the book written for? I’m not sure—it reads like a thinking person’s travelogue through urban India. This is also its strength—for all its misses, it takes the reader back to the reality of a complex, messy world of waste, an important armour against today’s silverbullet projects.
A lot of the authors’ good work is undone by the sweeping, often perceptionbased, generalisations they make