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Don't dump this issue

Menka Shivdasani

AS someone who believed in the importance of hygiene, what would you say if you were told you generate 450 gm of garbage per day? You pack it all into your bin at home, of course, and think you have done your duty when you hand it to the cleaner woman wh o rings your doorbell. What happens to it once it leaves your home is no concern of yours.

In Dharamsala, a tiny scenic hill station nestling 2,000 metres high in the Himalayas, an average of 30 tonnes of waste are generated daily. Of this, only five-eight tonnes are collected. The ragpickers -- with whom anybody should be familiar anywhere in India -- manage to get through two tonnes of garbage every day here, picking out scraps of food for survival and bits of metal and other goods they can sell. Twenty tonnes of garbage are dumped down the hillsides every day.

What happens, thanks to industrialisation and over-populated urban areas, is another story. For one, the quantities generated would be far larger; second, much of it is non-bio-degradable, and third, a great deal of it ends up overflowing on the streets, whatever the municipal commissioner might say about it having been cleaned up. Any attempts to segregate wet and dry garbage for easier recycling remains just an isolated example or two.

Clever management jargon does little to solve the issue; for instance, in Mumbai recently, there was a seminar on the subject. The theme grabbed enough attention -- it was meant to be a discussion on garbage disposal using Edward de Bono's six-hat theory -- but the intrigued participants who were drawn to the seminar told me nothing was achieved, apart from heated discussions that led nowhere. Meanwhile, the deadly leptospirosis has already claimed three people in the city, and there are fears that the number will rise, thanks to the garbage choking the drains.

Earth Matters, Mr Mike Pandey's excellent programme on environmental issues on DD Metro, focussed on garbage this week. It did not exactly make a pretty picture the first thing in the morning -- especially after those stunning shots of Dharamsala as the tourist brochures would have it -- but once you tightened your stomach muscles and stopped yourself from throwing up, it turned out to be interesting, indeed.

Of course, more people would have related to it if the show had focussed on a cooperative housing society in a city rather than one woman's attempts to deal with garbage in Dharamsala. What made the programme useful, however, was that the lady in questio n, a waste management consultant and conservationist, Ms Phillipa Russell, was shown segregating the waste and transforming the wet garbage into compost with a four-bin composting unit.

It is a method that could be used anywhere, and should be used by every society in the metros where so much waste is generated, and Earth Matters described in detail how the method could be used in the average home. The fact is, though, that most people would not have the patience; they would just tip it into the rubbish dump outside their homes and get on with their busy lives.

As for the dry garbage, guess what uses it can be put to. Earth Matters demonstrated how it could be converted into handmade paper for use in diaries, or recycled for other uses. The point the show was trying to make was -- look at garbage as a resource, not a problem. The amount we generate, maybe we should think about this seriously.

Meanwhile, there are people who worry about the garbage we put into our bodies. Much attention has lately been focussed on genetically engineered foods and whether there have been enough long-term tests done on them to justify their entry into the market .

Greenpeace India recently tested six food products to see if they contained genetically engineered ingredients and discovered that some of them did, indeed, test positive. Greenpeace activists like Ms Michelle Chawla have displayed concern over the healt h repercussions of such foods, pointing out that most of us are not even aware that they have already entered the market. They may be here in miniscule quantities still, but how soon will it be before the floodgates open?

The issue became a subject of discussion on STAR News, and Mr Devender Sharma, a food policy analyst, pointed out that such foods were doing more for the health of industry bottomlines than for the people they were meant to feed. ``We have to see whether we need them or are they just looking after industry?'' he asked.

Mr Gurumurti Natarajan, on the other hand, who was described as a molecular biologist, felt it was a ``savage travesty of truth'' to say that genetically modified crops would not solve the problems of people. After all, what could be wrong with products that had been researched and tested in 14 countries and were grown over 55 million hectares? Mr Natarajan also argued that such crops were pest-resistant and that they were injected with nutrients that would not otherwise exist in them.

Mr Sharma, however, hit it on the head when he pointed out that in a country such as India where so many millions of people could not even afford normal rice, there was no question of them being able to afford rice that supposedly had Vitamin A in it bec ause it had been genetically engineered. ``If these people were provided with ordinary rice, the deficiencies would not exist in the first place,'' he said.

The fact is, the multinationals have poured in millions of dollars into researching genetically engineered foods and they have not been doing it for charity. As the debate picks up momentum, however, and analysts like Mr Sharma ask for more experiments, these foods have already made an insidious entry into the country. As Ms Michelle Chawla put it just before the debate on STAR News, ``India may not have the luxury of time''.