Monday, August 1, 2016

Day 352: India Becoming



Life in the country had its rhythms; it was one of the nicest things about living in Auroville. The summers were dry and quiet, with a hot wind that emptied roads and public spaces. Winters were wet, and then cool, monsoon downpours followed by a clear, clean light and crowds of tourists. The familiarity, the predictability, was comforting. The world around me was moving so fast, but the seasons stayed constant.

Then one April the summer wind brought with it an unfamiliar guest: the smell of burning plastic. It started on a Sunday afternoon, a hint of bitterness, like something rotten in the air. I barely noticed. A couple days later my wife woke me in the middle of the night and said something was burning. This time the bitterness was unmistakable, overwhelming, a chemical taste in my mouth, a trail of roughness along my constricted throat.

My older son woke up, vomiting. We nursed him through the night. We told ourselves it was a stomach bug, something he’d eaten. But he’d eaten what we had all eaten, and as we stayed up with him, wiped his vomit and rubbed his stomach, comforted him, promised him it was nothing, it would pass, we couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that it was in fact something very real—that he’d been poisoned by the air.

The smell invaded our house throughout the following weeks and months. Sometimes it blew in during the day, mostly at night. It came from a twelve-acre landfill south of my home, next to a village called Karuvadikuppam, just outside the town of Pondicherry. It was Pondicherry’s main landfill. Every day, almost 400 tons of garbage—plastic bags and shoes and rubber tires and batteries mixed with rotting fruit and meat and rice—were carried there by tractors, and dumped in putrefying piles that emanated combustible methane gas.

The landfill was far from my house—across fields, a village, more fields, and then a forest and cashew plantations. It was almost two miles away. It had been there for over a decade, smoldering, throwing smoke into the atmosphere, but I had never noticed it. Now, with Pondicherry growing, its residents getting richer, buying more, discarding more, the dump had swollen.

Every day, the tractors brought their loads of garbage. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of tons had built up. The dump was running out of space. The fires, some man-made, some the result of spontaneous combustion, were getting bigger. The smoke was getting thicker, and traveling farther.

To me and my wife, the situation was bewildering. For so long, we had told ourselves that we were happy with the bargain we had made by choosing to live in rural India—happy to trade the vibrancy and life of the cities for the safety and cleanliness of the countryside. We had decided to live, to raise our children, in a place where crime was low, the water was drinkable, and the skies clear at night.

But now the world was crowding in—murder in the villages, poison in my living room. I was told that the dump was emitting dioxins and furans and other toxic chemicals. I was told that these poisons could lead to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. And I was told, too, that children, with their undeveloped immune systems, were most susceptible.

What were responsible parents to do? We kept our children off the roads after dark. We bought a new air conditioner. On a good night, a night when the fumes weren’t too thick, it filtered out the smell (though, I suspected, not the poison).

We talked a lot about moving. “But to where?” my wife would ask. Crime was everywhere, and so were the dumps, smoking heaps outside (and sometimes inside) cities, along highways, in fields and forests. In Chennai, just off Rajiv Gandhi Salai, a massive landfill spewed black smoke, making a mockery of the surrounding state-of-the-art technology complexes. I took a holiday in Goa, stayed at a high-end beach resort; every night, I choked on an all-too-familiar smell.

India produced some 100 million tons of municipal waste every year. On a per capita basis, this was still lower than most developed countries. But the problem was in the way the waste was treated—or not treated. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only 60 percent of municipal waste was even collected. A far smaller (almost nonexistent) amount was recycled. Instead, the garbage just piled up—and rotted, and smoldered, and polluted the air and water.

Sometimes, when I drove along highways lined with blazing mounds of garbage, when I passed through remote villages shrouded in acrid smoke, it seemed like there wasn’t a safe (or clean) corner in the country anymore. India, I began to feel, was burning.

India was burning—and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Half a million deaths a year were attributable to air pollution. Altogether, environmental damage cost about 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP (about the same amount the country spent every year on education or health).

Evidence of this destruction had been apparent around me for years. I had, of course, noticed how beaches and fields were being despoiled, how rivers and canals were choking on plastic bags, and how every scenic picnic spot was turning into a mire of paper plates and foam containers. I had seen these signs, registered them, but never really fit them together into a bigger picture. Auroville was green; I lived by a forest. I was shielded from—and a little blind to—the environmental calamity enveloping the nation.

But now the calamity had crept up on me, blown into my bedroom late one night, and into my children’s lungs. The smoke was in my house; I could smell the fire. I could no longer overlook the scale of the problem, or the terrible human toll I suddenly understood it was exacting across the nation.

In the weeks after I first smelled the garbage, I started paying more attention to the way we had been abusing our world. The crisis in Indian agriculture, which I had thought of primarily as a social drama, a tragedy played out in farmer suicides and disruptions to village culture, now became apparent to me as an ecological crisis. The fields around me had been abused with chemicals for too long. Farmers had taken their wells for granted. Now the land was dying, and the wells were emptying.

Everyone always said India needed better roads, that without new infrastructure the country couldn’t develop. I mostly agreed. Now, though, my eyes were fixed on the ancient tamarind and jackfruit trees that were being chopped down all over the place to make way for highways. Some of those trees were more than a century old; it took an excavator fifteen minutes to uproot them.

Along the beach, a twenty-minute drive from my house, the sandy stretch of coconut trees and fishing villages that lined the East Coast Road was slipping away, a victim of massive erosion. This was another man-made calamity. Some two decades ago, the town of Pondicherry had built a harbor farther down the coast. It was designed to spur development in the area. There was some debate about whether it had done that, but the harbor had indisputably blocked replenishing sand flows carried by currents from the south. Now the beaches around me were starved of nourishment.

I went to the ocean one day, to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi. It was on a beach I used to frequent as a child. I had heard about the erosion, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found. It was a shocking sight. A stretch of sand that had once extended for at least a hundred meters was now reduced to a strip of no more than ten or fifteen meters. Trees were uprooted, and fences and compound walls were breached. At least one electricity pole had come down. In the village, houses were perched precariously above the waters; some huts, I was told, had already been swallowed.

I sat on that sand, what was left of it, and I thought of just how little remained of the beach I had known as a boy. So much was being swept away. So much was being destroyed. I knew it was part of the compact of modern India: in with the new, out with the old, all in the name of progress.

I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay.

~~India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India -by- Akash Kapur

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