Flightster

Don’t Mess with Kolkata

• by Colin Wright
• on November 17th, 2011
• 1 Comment

I had never seen unabashed littering until I moved to Argentina.

Sure, I had seen people throw candy bar wrappers on the ground. Maybe they’d leave their styrofoam cup on the park bench when they left. And smokers, well, smokers just toss their spent butts wherever they like.

But until I landed in Buenos Aires, all the litterers I had seen at least had the conscience to look ashamed for what they were doing. A quick glance around to see if they were being judged by other pedestrians. A slight grimace as they committed their crime, as they got a little pat on on the head from their shoulder devil (while the shoulder angel gently wept over their actions).

In BsA, however, people would just toss whatever they had in their hands on the ground without missing a beat. If it was no longer useful to them, with a flick of the wrist it was no longer their problem. “Let’s let the city handle that one, shall we?” they seem to say, as they confidently stride off to go about their day, crime against nature and society not even forgotten, because it never even registered as something they should be concerned about.

Now that I live in Kolkata, I can tell you something about this part of India: Buenos Aires has nothing on the locals when it comes to littering. But I guess they have a few advantages.

First, and most obvious, is the fact that India’s population in ridiculously high. You get 1.4 billion people together in one place and you’re bound to produce a lot of waste.

Second, the government clears some streets, but not all, and not as regularly as one would hope. This leads to rapid trash accumulation.

Finally, Buenos Aires is a large city — one that is often called the ‘Paris of South America’ — while Kolkata is a smaller (well, smaller for India), less metropolitan city. That means people are much less likely to keep up aires when it comes to keeping their streets looking presentable.

I know in saying all this that my standards are skew from growing up in the US during the 80′s, 90′s and 21st century. The first decades, in fact, where the streets of San Francisco weren’t just as littered as those in Buenos Aires. What happened?

In the late-70′s and early-80′s, the US decided it was spending way too much money cleaning up litter every year, and that the damage being caused (in litter-related car accidents, and to the environment) were unacceptable. A huge campaign and series of litter-laws went into effect, and those who once believed littering was a ‘God-given right’ came to regard it as a dirty, low-class thing to do. Texas was the last to conform, but was finally won over by the now-famous ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ slogan.

This kind of litter-revolution has yet to happen in India, and with good reason.

India is a country that is just now starting to grow the middle class in a measurable way. The population is growing faster than anyone would have predicted, and there are so many basic problems (sanitation, the availability of clean water and shelter, child labor, etc) that need to be handled, keeping the streets looking nice and clean understandably takes a back burner in the population consciousness as a must-handle agenda-item.

That being said, I do tend to think that cleaning up the landscape would lead to a lot of positive benefits, and perhaps some that would help propel the country’s major goals forward with greater force.

At the moment, many of the countries major landmarks and tourist attractions are falling apart and covered in filth. Natural wonders are dying, destroyed or poisoned by pollution, and diseases run rampant due to the poor sanitary conditions. Removing the thick layers of styrofoam plates and paper cups and candy wrappers from the ground would help with this, leading to an increase in tourism, an improvement in local sanitation, and better-preserved national assets.

Establishing stricter litter laws would also improve the nation’s not-insiginificant image problem, which has led to difficulties in getting international funding for local businesses, and a general dissatisfaction by the population regarding a governing class that they see as pocketing tax payments, rather than using it to clean up the streets and improve their cities.

Sometimes it’s the little things that can make a city magical, and I’m hoping that sometime in the near-future Kolkata will enact a few small litter laws so that its magic sticks around for a long, long time.

Colin Wright

Colin Wright is a minimalist, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. While running his blog Exile Lifestyle ,his branding studio Colin Is My Name and his e-publishing business ebookling. Colin travels the world (moving to a new country every 4 months), meeting up with amazing people, giving talks (to audiences ranging from tech industry professionals to college students to Catholic school girls) and hunting down new and interesting experiences.