Waiting for Orangi

With Indian metros becoming massive wastelands of thousands of tonnes of garbage and filth, it’s time to learn from the great experiment in Karachi’s Orangi, where a slum has become a role model

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi

In a recent meeting of North Indian chief ministers, organised by PHDCCI in Chandigarh, Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dixit, whose campaign to clean Delhi’s polluted air got her international acclaim, expressed her helplessness at her government’s inability to dispose off 8,000 metric tonnes of waste that the capital generates everyday. She requested neighbouring states like Haryana and Punjab to build common garbage and effluent treatment networks in all the northern states.

   Dixit’s admission that Delhi’s garbage has nowhere to go is obvious to the people of the city, who have to live through gut-wrenching stench of putrefying waste collected at street corners or just anywhere. Delhi is not the only city where huge mountains of garbage are encroaching large parts of roads and living areas. The state of small towns with less municipal resources at their disposal is even worse. Many of these towns, due to the absence of sanitation, raise a kind of stink that can drive away any outsider used to cleaner air. Open defecation have also turned villages into open toilets, corrupting aquifers and leading to serious health hazards. 

On an average the country generates 50 million tonnes of waste everyday and if Dixit’s candid admission is anything to go by, then large parts of it just keeps piling up due to the absence of adequate landfills and waste dumps. In Delhi alone, 12 large waste dump sites have been totally packed and garbage has begun to overflow. Attempts to recycle waste or use it for producing power have failed. The waste-based power plant in Timarpur, in Delhi, proved to be a dud, as the Capital’s waste was not potent enough to generate electricity.

Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation is throwing up a big challenge to urban planners to somehow find ways to handle garbage of all kinds. As pointed out in many studies, urban areas—especially the rich ones—create more garbage than rural ones. The reason is not difficult to comprehend. Urban areas are sustained by the resources of the countryside and the ‘ecological footprint’ of each person is the land area needed by each person for consumption and waste disposal. The ecological footprint in prosperous West is 2.3 hectares of land per capita. The ideal footprint is 1.7 hectares. In poor societies like India, the ecological footprint of a slum dweller in Delhi is a lowly 0.8 hectares. In a nutshell, the rich create and dump more effluents and waste, while the poor create much less, but the poor are eternally trashed and demonised due to their abominable, sub-human living conditions. 

It is intrinsic in the process of urbanisation to create such problems. Even China is not immune from this problem, but

compared with India it is planning ahead to ensure it does not become a drag on growth. The Chinese government is expected to sink thousands of crores to handle its garbage and sanitation problems.

In India, for instance, the efforts have been, at best, perfunctory. At times they are a manifestation of individual enterprise—Surat and Suryapet are examples where the district commissioners cleaned up the city—or a knee-jerk reaction to judicial orders. There has not been an organised campaign to clean up India since Independence, even when the father of nation, Mahatma Gandhi, was categorical that cleanliness was important than even Independence. He worked in dalit bastis, experimented with and designed different forms of toilets, especially in rural India, gave long discourses on clean sanitation habits, and he was never averse to cleaning public toilets himself.

In spite of his obsession for sanitation, the leadership of Independent India did not do enough to provide wet toilets to all the 5.5 lakh villages of the country. Even till this day, the degrading occupation of manual scavengers exists and people carry excreta on their heads. Indeed, why can’t the government give alternative occupation to these poorest and condemned citizens of India?

A special initiative has been taken up by Union Rural Development Minister, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who wrote to all the chief ministers of the states that people should not be allowed to contest for panchayat till they had “toilets at home”. He was categorical that “no toilet, no seat” would be an effective slogan. Singh revealed that 65 per cent of India does not have toilets and many of the panchayat members defecate in the open. According to him,  open defecation results in dirtying the water sources, which leads to major and widespread typically Indian epidemics like dysentery, malaria, etc. Community health sources claim that 25 per cent of illnesses are due to environmental reasons.

Singh’s rural development ministry has initiated a programme, Nirmal Gram Puraskar, whereby in villages that work towards toilets for every house, each home will get an award of Rs 5 lakh.

The encouraging thing is that more and more villages are working hard to win this award. Initially, these villages were in double digits, but now, ministry sources say, they are in thousands.

However, the bigger problem of sanitation stems from the people who live in the slums. In many of the slums in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, millions of people live in sub-human conditions, constantly ravaged by diseases of all kinds. They do not get safe drinking water, nor do they have access to clean, public toilets.

Worse still, they always live under the fear of slum demolitions, as the urban renewal and beautification campaign (Shangaisation) gains ground and shopping malls and five-star hotels take over slums. These beautification campaigns, conducted to please the rich and the middle class that owns their own homes, have dislocated lakhs of people in the Indian metros.

This phenomenon is not limited to India alone and is visible in many societies that pursue neo-liberal economic policies. The result of this insecurity is that slum dwellers do not have a stake in the place they live in. Innumerable studies have shown that people who are assured of permanency of stay take pains to clean up their environment. In Singapore, for example, 90 per cent of the people live in their own homes and we know how clean the city is. In many slums in South Asian countries, attempts have been made to assure inhabitants that they would not be dislocated and it has worked wonders in cleaning up the environment.

The Orangi slum in Karachi is a case in point. According to a Johns Hopkins University study, Orangi represents one of the world’s best known community efforts to provide affordable sanitation and waste-water management. “The local government,” the report says, “was unable to deliver an adequate sanitation system to Orangi, Karachi’s biggest slum settlement. The Orangi Pilot Project proposed the installation of a self-financed and self-managed sewerage system. The project found a way to lower the cost of latrines and sewerage lines so that the poor could afford them. The project organised meetings for neighbourhood residents to explain the benefits of quality sanitation.”

At this moment, the Orangi project has covered almost 84 per cent of the settlement. Collectively, residents have raised about US $1.7 million to self-finance the construction of their sanitation system. More than 72,000 sanitary latrines have been installed, and 1.3 million feet of sewer lines have been laid.

Similar initiatives are required in India to fight the growing ‘waste industry’ and provide clean and functional sanitation. Surat, after plague struck this Gujarat town, became India’s cleanest city after the citizens realised what garbage was doing to them. After dengue and chikungunya, there is  need to take a re-look at how we are urbanising and why it is necessary to accommodate our poor with sensitivity and dignity so that they are not falsely accused for being habitual polluters.