WHEN WE TREAT PEOPLE LIKE GARBAGE

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

We desis pride ourselves on having been ecofriendly before it was a thing. Been there, done that, for decades, we say a trifle smugly.

Reusable shopping bags? We used jholas!

Biofuel? Cowdung patties! Gobar gas!

Solar energy? We dried clothes (and spices and papad) in the sun!

Recycling? We exchanged newspapers and glass bottles, etc., for stainless steel pots and pans!

But I wonder how many of us stopped to think of how the whole clean-green cycle worked. Oh, we may have been aware of the horrific conditions in which those who cleaned drains and sewers manually laboured, but beyond expressing shock and shaking our heads, how much did we really care to find out?

Manisha Anantharaman did, and her book Recylcing Class (a great play on words) is a behind the scenes look at what it takes to keep a city like Bengaluru clean.

It could have been set in any Indian city – the conditions vary only in degrees – but that it is in Bengaluru, makes it extra special for me. I know the city from its Bangalore days, when it was still the Garden City or the “air-conditioned” city. When homes didn’t have ceiling fans and one needed a light sweater year-round. When those who visited us from other parts of the country were amazed at the wide, clean, gulmohar-lined streets.

And I witnessed the changes as it morphed into the IT hub of the country, the mantle of India’s Silicon Valley hiding the growing piles of refuse. As the weather changed, people began to drive in air-conditioned vehicles. “If you kept the windows down, you’d die of the smoke and the pollution, if you rolled them up, of the heat,” said a friend. Once the pensioner’s paradise, it is now ranked as India’s least-livable large metro.

Thus this book that describes Anantharaman’s visit to Koshy’s restaurant in the first few pages, took me back to a city that holds a very special place in my heart – though she does venture farther afield, describing the waste-to-energy plants at Okhla and Ghazipur, lessons from which were put to good use in Bengaluru. With her, I explored old, familiar neighbourhoods of Malleswaram, Basavanagudi and Sadashivnagar, but also discovered new burbs like KK Nagar that emerged in the 2000s.

Well-meaning environmentalists work to achieve clean and green cities through behaviour change, infrastructure upgrades and market mechanisms, she writes. “But their attempts at achieving sustainable cities require the labour of waste workers, who they retain in class- and caste-subjugated roles.”

Anantharaman turns an unflinching eye at her own position as a woman born into a middle-class Brahmin family and how she challenged her own inherent biases and prejudices. “Caste, class, and gender divisions are in your face. You would have to be skilful in delusion to ignore them.”

She quotes a multitude of research on the subject, including the work of Harini Nagendra, an academic and environmentalist whom many know as the author of The Bangalore Detectives Club series.

What passes as ecological restoration projects in official documents is fundamentally oriented towards the creation of enclosed, upper-class spaces, over-riding concerns over collective justice.

“The performance of green as a high-status practice is directly enabled by class privilege and further class distinction. Sustainable consumption practitioners legitimize their bicycling, recycling, and gardening practices by actively distancing them from the livelihood practices of the poor.”

And, performative environmentalism is accessible only to a privileged few. It pretends that everyone has access to these environmental practices and then stigmatizes those who do not enact them as either ill-informed or uncaring, she writes.

An image conveys this idea beautifully. A spandex-clad cyclist on his mountain bike passes a man carrying a large number of plastic buckets precariously balanced on a old bike.

Anantharaman points out that Bengaluru is also the destination for e-waste discarded by consumers in the west, processed by largely Muslim and Dalit recyclers.

She describes in detail the work of Parisara Tanda advocating for the rights of waste pickers. Its members “partner with global brands like H&M and The Body Shop, have been featured in lifestyle magazines, and speak at national and global environmental summits”.

And of Banyan Nation, founded as a sustainable business by engineers, MBAs and other NRIs. One that continues to see the benefits of informal waste collectors. It’s fascinating that words for garbage or rubbish like kachra or kabaad are now being incorporated into upscale ventures. There’s Kabadiwallah Connect, for one.

In-depth interviews with key players like Kranthi, a 38-year-old tech executive; Swamy, the head of a manufacturing firm who calls his home Kachra Mane because it incorporates discarded materials; Geetha and Sanvi who work at Recycling Habba and admit to using “polite pressure” to get people to recycle present a radical new view of the politics, “purity-pollution dynamic” of caste and outcomes of sustainability initiatives.

“What started as a movement to keep waste off the streets evolved, first, to include a more ecological understanding of the issue, and eventually included topics that the middle-class zero-waste movement would never have thought about alone: occupational health, housing, and social security for waste pickers, reversing privatization of water management, and a serious discussion about holding the producers of plastic and nonrecyclable materials accountable.”