Waste of Nation - Garbage, and Growth in India is one of the most important books I have read in recent times related to waste management particularly for India.
The authors Assa Doran and Robin Jeffrey did a splendid job researching and analyzing the handling of waste in India. Over 8 years since 2012, Assa Doran and Robin Jeffrey have enrolled in understanding the waste in India from different lenses and perspectives.
In this article, I’ll summarize the main ideas from the book. Assume anything below written is directly taken or paraphrased from the book, although I’ve tried to add my own insights from my experiences as well from the books I have read in past to explain the observations and interpretations made in the book.
Any mistakes or misinterpretations in this article are mine.
Two Fundamental Questions
At the very beginning of the book the author asks two very important questions
why India is so filthy? and what is waste? - answering these two questions lays the foundation or the premise of the entire book. Answering the first question, the author compares India with Great Britain during the end of the 19th century and talks about how Britain was in the same situation, with plagues and malaria spreading across the country. But also while comparing, he opines that despite being a filthy and disease-prone nation, India secures and survives itself from the diseases using modern science miracles that are the vaccines which during the end of 19th-century great Britain did not have.
while answering the second question, What is waste? - authors try to find and interpret the meaning of waste in different parts of the world. In other countries, especially in western countries, waste is treated as the material that is thrown away, whatever dirt is waste, while in India waste has many meanings, the Ganga river which is dirty and filthy, but considering the religious sentiments, the river Ganga is considered the cleanest and purest. The marginal communities called as Dalits treat waste as a source of living. They earn their living collecting and recycling the thrown away materials.
Time And Place
In the first chapter of the book, the author talks about India during British rule. India was considered a filthy nation, where citizens carrying harmful bacterias. Any person or goods coming from India were considered filthy and assumed it contains bad, contagious, and deadly bacteria and germs. So the goods coming from India were sanitized and people were strictly quarantined during British rule in the late 19th century.
The author also discusses the dumpsite in India and their management by Indian Municipalities. Usually, the management of the dumpsites is given to companies through issues tenders, but due to lack of power at the lower level of governance, that is at the municipality level, the private management of the dumpsites is compromised.
The author further discusses various examples of successful private-public partnerships for dumpsites management around the world, while in India it is not been successful because of the underpowered municipalities.
Growth and Garbage
In the mid 20th century, the aftermath of the great depression and leading to the Industrial Revolution, there has been a significant change in behavior towards consuming products and throwing them.
In India particularly, challenges increase as India grows, urbanizes, and attempts to satisfy the aspirations of its citizens for the comforts of life.
India immediately after Independence was a frugal place. Most of what households threw away was a biodegradable waste of the kind that animals and weather could deal with it. Medical waste was limited. Syringes were always reused and sometimes sterilized. Towns and cities grew slowly, construction and demolition waste was limited and readily seized for reuse. Cities grew slowly, construction and demolition waste was limited and readily seized for reuse. If waste did not grow greatly in those early decades, the population did. Population added at about 2.3perc a year. As the population grew, so did the volume of waste. It became more difficult to manage waste even though most of the waste consisted of biodegradable material.
The most common consumer item that we find in every Indian household is toothbrush and toothpaste. The book chooses the topic of toothpaste and toothbrush to understand the magnitude of India’s collision with hard waste (plastic, glass, paper, medical, electrical). In India, the tool for cleaning teeth and gums had long been a twig usually taken from a neem tree, which can be plucked each morning, chewed into a cleaning brush, and then thrown away. Toothbrushes and tooth-powders had not gained popularity in the villages until the late 1960s. Consumption of toothpaste was meager. India’s toothpaste industry in the mid-1970s was estimated to produce about 1,200 metric tons a year for a population of more than 600 million. By the late 1990s and due to the economic liberalization of 1991, the Indian Market was said to be growing rapidly. By 2014, a single new factory set up in Gujarat by Colgate-Palmolive was capable of making 15,000 metric tons of toothpaste a year, more than ten times the quantity produced in all of India two generations earlier. The volume and steady growth of rejected things - waste, garbage, rubbish, refuse, sewage - pose immense challenges to India. When the Indian government began to analyze waste, the Central Pollution Control Board surveyed fifty-nine cities to calculate the volume. That exercise suggested that in 2004 these cities generated about 50,000 metric tons of waste a day, or less than 20 million metric tons a year. Over the next 10 years, various measurements estimated annual waste collection in towns and cities at somewhere between 50 million and 90 million metric tons annually. The magnitude and density of India’s encounter with consumer capitalism and urbanization present unique problems.
Local Governments and Limitations
Whenever there is an issue related to garbage, sewage, or the prevention of noxious activity near the dwellings of the influential people.
The Indian Governments are unable to deal with the vast amount of waste their growing populations produce daily. The reasons have their roots in British rule. Even through multiple amendments in the constitution after independence, the structure is preserved in which local governments were expected to act simply as delivery mechanisms for programs devised by national and state governments
In the sector of waste management, the local governments were expected to do things, but they lacked authority and financial resources. The powers of local governments depend on the law of the state in which they operate. The constitutional amendments that required states to set up local governments do not specify the rules and some states do their best to ensure that “local bodies remain mere agents of the state government. Other states, notably Kerala, devolved substantial funds and powers to its one thousand units of local government in the 1990s. [31]
In the case of Pammal, we learned that there is an important need for persistence and sustainability. Finally, the conflict with the neighboring municipality underlines the need for superior authorities who are able to resolve disputes, promote cooperation, and create large facilities who are able to resolve disputes, promote cooperation and create large facilities - such as sanitary landfills and sewage treatment plants - to serve the needs of different local government units.
It is true that local governments lack the powers and finances to fulfill the responsibilities expected of them. But even if funds and authority become available, elected representatives and employees lack training, expertise, and motivation. Waste management, which is an inescapable aspect of local government, generates a distinctively Indian stigma, and the salaries and incentives are not notably attractive, even in metropolitan cities. Local government is not a popular career choice, probably anywhere in the world and especially in India. Career possibilities in local government are different in countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia, where elected municipal governments advertise key positions. Applicants are usually on contracts, and during their careers, they move a number of times, take on greater responsibilities, and receive higher salaries. In India, local government suffers from administrative prejudices inherited from British rule and the reluctance of state politicians to lose patronage and create rivals.
But despite lack of good governance, there is a ray of hope in improving the state of the local governments.
Throughout the country, various efforts are made to improve capacity. In Bengaluru, the Bangalore Political Action Committee (B.PAC), an NGO founded in 2012 “to convert urban apathy into positive urban engagement” and provoked by the city’s problems with waste, began a “civic leadership incubator program” to equip likely candidates for local elected offices. The aim is to train a thousand people, over five years, in cohorts of about fifty.