India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (35 page)

Raghu had only three pigs. He had three pigs and four children, and so he was forced to scavenge. He was a practical man, not like the balloon seller. He would take care of his family. One day, though, Raghu said, I would visit the camp and see that he, too, had a brightly painted house. He would keep working on the landfill; he would save; and then, finally, he would escape the garbage.

“It’s our profession, it’s like our business,” Raghu said. “If they move this place, I don’t know what will happen to us. Of course we don’t have the power to stop it. We don’t have any power. If they move it, I guess we’ll have to shut down our business. I suppose we’ll find something else. But I know this: I know that some of us will starve.”

Raghu’s dilemma—the sense that he was forced to choose between
his livelihood and his health, that addressing the environmental catastrophe at his doorstep would mean losing his income—was an old one in India. Some forty years ago, Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi attended the first United Nations conference on the environment, in Stockholm, and announced to her audience that poverty was the worst form of pollution. Her words set the tone for the way India thought of the environment for decades. Ecological activism was seen as a luxury for the rich; it was something a poor country like India couldn’t afford.

Today, when I talk to people who were involved in India’s nascent environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the sense I get is of a lonely struggle. They were up against a popular perception that environmentalists were elitists, more concerned with saving trees and animals than helping the country’s poor. One veteran of the movement, in his sixties now, told me that he was accused of being “anti-development,” and that he was labeled a “dinosaur” for his perceived opposition to India’s progress.

A certain tension between the environment and development still exists in India (as, indeed, it does in much of the Western world: think of the United States’ reluctance to impose a carbon tax for concern that it could stifle growth). But in recent years, as India has become richer, and as the state of the environment has in tandem become more precarious, it is a tension—and a distinction—that has become less and less tenable to maintain.

Men like Raghu don’t live next to uncontrolled waste dumps because the nation is too poor to provide them with an alternative. They do so because India’s prosperity is at least in part built on a model that keeps millions of people economically and environmentally subjugated. For Raghu, pollution is just another dimension of his poverty. His choice—India’s choice—isn’t between a job and clean air. It is between a model of growth built on the backs of the poor and the ruins of the environment, on the one
hand; and on the other, a model that is economically inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

These were the thoughts—or variations of them, at least, because I wasn’t thinking quite so clearly—that were in my mind as Sathy and I drove away from the gypsy camp that afternoon. I was angry, as I usually was after visiting the landfill. With the air conditioner on high again, and the stench slowly filtering out of the car, I continued the diatribe I had begun on the terrace overlooking the dump.

I told Sathy that when I talked to people like Raghu, so desperate to preserve the very thing that was killing him, I felt like something was fundamentally wrong in the nation. What kind of country imposed those kinds of choices on its people? What kind of economic superpower (even if it was a self-proclaimed one) allowed its citizens to live in those kinds of conditions?

I blamed consumerism, I blamed capitalism, I blamed the blindness of the middle classes and the callousness of the government. I was strident, worked up, maybe a little shrill. But I felt so helpless and frustrated. I kept returning, in my thoughts, to the night my son had woken up vomiting. I said again that I wondered what I was doing to my children; I wondered if I should move them somewhere safer.

Leaving the landfill seemed to loosen Sathy up a bit. He talked more now, first in a trickle, then in his habitual torrent. He said that, waiting for me while I spoke to the gypsies, watching as kids and pigs ran around, played with each other, he’d been possessed by a thought. For the first time in his life, he felt as if there was no difference between animals and humans. The landfill had reduced people to beasts. It was appalling, it was pitiful, and it was
shameful. He, too, wondered what kind of country could treat its people that way.

He said he rarely felt hopeless, but when confronted with that landfill in Karuvadikuppam, he couldn’t help feeling that India faced insurmountable problems. It’s true, he said, that the government didn’t care about those gypsies, and neither did society. But even if someone did care, if someone did want to help, what could they do?

Standing on that terrace, Sathy said, he felt like he was up against something larger than humans. It wasn’t unlike the forces tearing apart his village: it was epochal, it was imposing, and it was beyond control. “I love this country, it’s my home,” Sathy said. “But sometimes I wonder what’s happening to it. I come here with you and I see this kind of burning. I think: ‘What’s going on? What are we doing? What hope is there for India?’

“We’re just too many people in this country, Akash,” he went on. “This country is too big. What can we do with one billion people? Who can stop them? I really believe that this is something unstoppable. Nothing can reverse the direction of such a big country. It’s like a huge machine. Once the destruction starts, there’s nothing anyone can do.”

Sathy talked like that the whole way back—through the cashew plantations bordering the landfill, through the mansions enveloped in smoke, through the littered fields, and then through the forest near my house. As I was getting out of the car, he did something unusual. He shook my hand. Then he said: “I’m sorry, Akash. I don’t think I can help you with this. There’s nothing I can do. I can introduce you to everyone I know, but the problem is just too big. It’s beyond one man. Maybe it’s even beyond all of us.”

Was it all really as hopeless as it seemed? In Mumbai, I had followed
the work Vinod was doing with the ragpickers of Dharavi. In the offices of his nonprofit organization, I had seen the heaps of waste, segregated into neat little bundles of plastic and metals and paper, ready to be shipped out to the informal recycling units that dotted the slum. One weekend I attended an “eco fair” that Vinod hosted in a park at the edge of Dharavi; it was a lively event, attended by movie stars and artists and musicians, and hundreds of eager children.

Closer to home, around Pondicherry, I had seen similar projects, all designed to ease India’s garbage crisis. I saw school curriculums that tried to raise environmental awareness, and I saw street fairs organized with the same purpose. In a shed at the edge of a field, I saw a large concrete tank filled with pink worms writhing in a coarse brown powder. It was a vermicomposting project; the worms ate garbage, and excreted it as compost that could be used for agriculture.

All these efforts were well intentioned and, from what I could tell, mostly well run. They were not unimpressive. But they were so small when measured against the scale of the problem. We were, as Sathy had said, a nation of a billion people, all caught up in a scramble for riches, all eager participants in India’s consumptive binge. There were tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of steaming landfills like the one by my house. The projects I saw seemed insignificant—tiny points of light in the vast and otherwise dark firmament of India’s garbage catastrophe.

A report I read estimated that India’s production of waste would increase by 130 percent over the first three decades of the century. Numbers like that gave me little reason for hope. Every time I visited the landfill at Karuvadikuppam, when I saw the seemingly interminable procession of those municipal tractors, piling their poison ever higher, I was left with a humiliating mix of resignation and impotent rage.

I decided to pay a visit to Vinod. I knew a little about the work he was doing to promote recycling, and I respected it: I admired the passion he brought to what I had come to consider a hopeless task. I thought that maybe in Vinod’s persistence I could find an antidote to the negativity, the sense of helplessness, that had possessed me since the dioxins started blowing into my home.

I met Vinod at his home in Bandra. He lived with his wife in a small one-bedroom apartment, off a winding lane behind Bandra’s imposing St. Andrew’s Church (the largest, and oldest, in the neighborhood). He lived in a waterfront building. The view from the dining table in his living room was pleasant, at least by Mumbai standards: shimmering (if blackened) waters, and a rocky promontory dotted with a few surviving mangroves.

But then, when I stood up from that table, walked to the end of his living room, and looked out at the ocean through a window, I saw that the shore was lined with a thick, compressed slab of garbage, consisting mainly of plastic bags. Vinod said the garbage was flushed out through the city’s sewage system. Sometimes, people set it on fire. The smoke blew into his apartment. He, too, suffered the dioxins. His wife told me they had recently been forced—reluctantly, because it was an additional expense and put a burden on the environment—to buy an air conditioner.

Vinod and his wife had moved into their apartment in the early nineties. He said that in the two decades since then—a period of time that corresponded with India’s transition from a planned economy to a capitalist one—the waste on the shoreline “had grown by feet.” For Vinod, this was clear indication, visible and gruesome evidence, of the connection between the nation’s economic success and its despoiled environment.

When Vinod talked about India’s environmental problems, he used the same language he applied to the nation’s capitalist economy. He talked about “corporate greed,” “out-of-control growth,” and “unequal and unjust policies that exclude the people.”

Vinod told me about traveling the country, seeing rivers that had turned red from chemical effluents, and agricultural land that had become barren because industries were over-pumping the water table. He said he’d recently taken a trip to the South Indian town of Mangalore, where he’d grown up. He was dismayed by what he saw. The coconut plantations and forested hills of his childhood had all but disappeared. The hills were denuded, and entire villages were covered with a layer of red powder from iron oxide mines in the area.

In his work at Dharavi, too, Vinod saw the link between India’s new economy and its troubled environment. Not only was the quantity of waste increasing dramatically, but the composition of that waste was changing, too. Whereas Indian garbage had once consisted primarily of biodegradable materials (kitchen waste, for example), now the proportion of plastic, batteries, and other nondegradable materials was rising. The volume of electronic waste, in particular, was alarming. Vinod lamented the “insatiable greed” of a new middle class that had forgotten an earlier generation’s
frugality. He said we were like the West now: we dumped goods as soon as they broke, and often even when they were still working, just because we wanted the latest model.

Vinod and I left his apartment, walked out to the shore. We made our way, gingerly, across the garbage. We stood at the edge of the waters and Vinod burrowed his shoe into the plastic, dug a hole that revealed black sand. He said that when he had first moved in, this had been a sandy beach.

We stood on that garbage, a few pigs running around us, and I caught a whiff of a smell I knew too well. Farther down the shore, someone had lit a fire. I pointed it out to Vinod, and he just laughed. I asked how he maintained his humor. He said there was no choice: What else could he do? He couldn’t stop all the fires. He just kept working, plugging away, searching for solutions, remaining confident that the nation wouldn’t, ultimately, commit suicide.

He acknowledged feeling sad sometimes. On that recent trip to his hometown, when he saw villages covered in red from the mines, he was overcome by “a feeling of loss.” “Something very dear to me was being destroyed,” he said. “All my peaceful childhood memories are tormented now by those horrible images.” But at the same time, he returned from his trip motivated to fight harder. He said: “Seeing all of that gave me the conviction and the courage to keep campaigning, to teach children and a new generation about how precious our natural world is.”