Cleaning Kolkata

Kolkata has been called the City of Joy. However, not many people know that the source of this name is a novel of the same name by Dominique Lappiere. He celebrated the city of Kolkata with all its flaws. However, that celebration was gritty, dirty and painted a picture pf Kolkata's underbelly like never before. In Lappiere's novel, Kolkata is not so much a joyful and beautiful metropolis but a city of slums and destitution. Anandanagar was the slum he wrote about which translates to the City of Joy in English.

While Kolkata has come along a long way and the city's skyline now boasts of highrises and suave office buildings, the city still has that dirty look around every corner. The streets are cleaner no doubt but not as clean as it should be.

When Swachh Bharat was launched with much fanfare in 2014, I was excited like never before. I thought that finally the cities garbage dumps will get cleaned, that people will not throw garbage in every available empty plot.

Reality, however, is a harsh mistress. In the last five years, there has been no visible change as far as urban solid waste management and general cleanliness of the city is concerned. I do not know if the reason is that Swachh Bharat had more focus on building toilets than solid waste management, or because of the political differences between the center and the state governments.

I do know that nothing much has changed. Just today, I was taking a walk around my own locality Lake Town, around the lake and I was shocked to see the amount of filth and garbage people have dumped around the lake. It really made me sad. Is it really so hard for the municipality to do a one time clean up and plant some plants and shrubs and start a garden?

There are ample research and anecdotes which shows that once a place is cleaned up and made into something beautiful, people reduce or stop loitering. That the municipality has not cared for years is the reason why people think that the lake is a garbage dump. What is just one plastic bag thrown into the dump when there are thousands already?

I do not know when will people's mindset change. I do not know when will our political leaders be made really accountable to the environment.

I am not very hopeful. Sometimes I feel that perhaps, I am also responsible for this. What action do I take to stop this? Me and people like me who care about the environment should do more but the fact is that cleaning up the city requires across the board political support and government action.

And that's precisely the reason why I am not very hopeful because most people don't seem concerned and by extension, most politicians are not concerned.

This will probably not change anytime soon and while things continue to remain the same for the foreseeable future, I will continue to do my small things, like trying to reason with people about not burning plastics in front of their shops.

I will talk about this sickening phenomenon of burning plastics in a follow-up post. That post probably will be a little more hopeful. With this positive note, let me stop my rambling for now.