‘Drowning in trash’: Indian volunteers spurred into action by nauseating rubbish dumps
Each day, every Indian generates about 200 to 600 grams of rubbish, and the vast majority of that ends up tossed into the country’s forests, parks, streets and sidewalks, rivers or surrounding oceans
Lawyer Afroz Shah moved to Mumbai with a dream of looking out at the wild, blue Arabian Sea. What he saw instead was nauseating – waves churning with plastic shopping bags and empty chip packets, beaches covered so thick with soda bottles and snack wrappers he could no longer see the sand.
The coast off India’s financial capital, like so many other places across the South Asian nation, has become choked by rubbish tossed without much thought by the millions of people who live there.
“I could have gone to the court. I could have complained” to municipal authorities, said Shah, 34. Instead, he decided to take action with his own two hands.
He and a neighbour near Mumbai’s Versova Beach pulled on glove and face masks and began picking rubbish out of the sand. Gradually, they were joined by other volunteers and sometimes tourists. Over 98 weekends they gathered more than 5 million kg of rubbish.
“This littering is done by us,” Shah says of his fellow Indian citizens. “I should pick it up.”
The citizen has to realise that ‘this is my waste, nobody is going to take care of it but me’
One environmental activist calls India’s rubbish problem a “ticking time bomb” that will ultimately bury the nation’s cities and towns unless its 1.3 billion people stop littering at will. The country is “drowning in trash”, says Chitra Mukherjee of the New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group.
