Pratik

Nerve Endings Firing Away

As I remained cooped up at home, forced by quarantine rules, I have had the chance to take in the changes that have occurred in my hometown since I last visited nearly ten years ago.

I have been compiling a list, but the one thing that stood out for me was garbage collection. Last I remember, an open garbage dumpster was built in concrete at every other street corner. We were expected to walk over with our garbage can in hand and toss it in. If it was full, people just dumped around it. It was festering flies-ridden horrid-smelling eyesore 🤮 Street dogs and pigs rummaged through it freely. I wonder how we didn’t fall ill more often.

Now, it was a completely different sight. I noticed that my parents (or rather their maid) kept our trashcan outside the main door the last thing in the night. I noticed that they even had a garbage bag 1for the wet trash, so they often didn’t dirty the pail. I wondered what happened to the garbage after that because, in the morning, it was empty.

As I found out, the watchman for the building took the larger trash cart from door to door (they have only four flats/apartments in the four-story building) and tossed the contents of the pails in 2. He then rolled out the trash can, and I never thought I would say this, but a garbage truck came by EVERY DAY. The crew grabbed the larger trash can and emptied its contents in the truck (see image above). The truck was often playing popular Bollywood or Marathi music loudly, so everyone knew it was there.

I know this may sound highly patronizing by most contemporary Indians or as “so what?” by most western countries, but this was unthinkable if you lived in this town 10-15 years ago. Or perhaps our neighborhood has become an upscale one 3 that’s lucky to get such services?

But of course, it’s not as glamorous, however loosely you may define it, as in the U.S. at least. As you see in the image above, the truck is not a specialized garbage truck which would be unaffordable for this town, but a simple open-air one. The one person on the ground hoists the cart into the truck, and the two men in the back empty its contents into the pile behind them. They use their bare hands to sift through the garbage and pick out the large recyclables (bottles, cardboard boxes, etc.) into one of those containers in the front.

I also noticed that if you don’t use garbage bags but simply those micro plastic shopping bags, they will dump out its content and toss the bags into the other container, presumably to reduce plastic bags in the landfill 4 and to encourage the use of biodegradable garbage bags, but not everyone can afford them.

This might seem highly unhygienic and toxic for garbage collectors, but trust me, India has worse sanitation jobs (think Trainspotting if you are wary of clicking that link) But overall, in terms of public health, this is a welcome change and at least doesn’t allow for garbage accumulation for a long time.


  1. I had to ask our maid to purchase larger size bags because the ones they had didn’t exactly fit but apart from them, it worked just as well as it does in the US. ↩︎

  2. I assume in nearby buildings where they may not always have a watchman, the residents took their own trash pails downstairs and dumped it into the larger one. I assume the last one to do so would roll it out to the street. ↩︎

  3. The land prices definitely make it seem that way. ↩︎

  4. I have my doubts that it gets tossed in a landfill. Most likely, they burn it at night. That might explain that smell as the sun sets, health effects be damned. ↩︎


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