From floodwaters to plastic mountains — India’s civic sense on trial

The floods came rushing into Assam, Bihar, Uttarakhand and other parts of India. People needed emergency survival supplies and relief, especially water. Bottled water poured in by the truckloads, as it should. The Government, relief agencies, volunteers, companies and ordinary citizens did what Indians do wonderfully well in a crisis: they opened their hearts and gave.

Now to the less photogenic part. What happens to all those empty bottles? It is a question that is almost absurd to ask in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. Yet, it is precisely the question India postpones until the cameras have gone away. Yes, the water was necessary. The bottle was unavoidable. But the bottle does not magically disappear simply because the emergency does.

That is where last week’s column on this year’s devastating floods opens an uncomfortable doorway into all of India. Because the floodwaters will recede. The empty plastic bottles will remain.

'Not my problem'

Look around India and the evidence is everywhere. The plastic bottle thrown beside the highway. The wafer packet dropped five feet from a dustbin. The namkeen wrapper pushed under a park bench. The cigarette packet crushed onto a pavement. The empty soft-drink bottle rolling along a railway platform. The takeaway container abandoned outside a restaurant. The beer bottle left behind on a mountain. Because carrying a full bottle uphill is admirable, but carrying an empty one back down the same hill is unbearable.

We consume. We discard. We walk away. Somebody else will clean it. That somebody is usually a municipal worker, a sanitation worker, a waste picker or an invisible army of people whose labour we notice only when they fail to perform it. This is not merely a garbage problem. It is a civic character disaster.

India generated an estimated 4.14 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2022-23, according to data submitted by the Government in Parliament. The country generated an average 1.70 lakh tonnes of municipal solid waste every day, of which about 91,500 tonnes was treated, according to the latest available estimates.

The numbers are enormous. But walk down an ordinary Indian street and the problem becomes much simpler. It is one empty bottle. Then another. And another.

Clean-Up Delusion

We have spent years talking about cleanliness as though it were primarily a government service or responsibility. Of course, municipalities have responsibilities. Collection, segregation, recycling, processing and disposal require infrastructure. India has laws governing plastic waste. Producers have ‘Extended Producer Responsibility’ obligations. Urban local bodies and gram panchayats have responsibilities for collection and management. Identified single-use plastic items have been banned since 2022.

But legislation cannot compensate indefinitely for the absence of civic behaviour. A municipal worker can collect the garbage. He cannot stop a citizen from throwing it. The authorities can install a dustbin. They cannot force someone to walk three metres towards it. A manufacturer can be made responsible for its packaging. It cannot follow every bottle after an Indian consumer has flung it into a drain.

We have somehow constructed a remarkable social arrangement in which the person who creates the waste has the least responsibility for it. And this instinct extends far beyond garbage. Someone else will clean the street. Someone else will unclog the drain. Someone else will pick up the cigarette packet. Someone else will remove the plastic from the river. Someone else will repair what we break.

Someone else. Always someone else.

What belongs to us

Perhaps the real problem is that we have never quite understood the idea of ‘The Commons’. The road is ours. The pavement is ours. The river is ours. The mountain is ours. The railway station, the park, the beach, the public toilet – all of them are ours. Not the Government’s. Not the municipality’s. Ours.

And yet, anything that belongs to everybody somehow becomes nobody’s responsibility. We will protect the cleanliness of our home because it is ours. We will wash our car because it is ours. We will complain furiously if somebody litters outside our gate. But move ten metres beyond that imaginary boundary and the moral obligation often disappears.

That is not a failure of sanitation. It is a failure of citizenship. A country does not become developed because it builds airports, expressways, metros and smart cities. Development is also the ability of citizens to understand that the space between their front door and the horizon belongs to them too. We cannot build world-class cities while behaving as though everything outside our doors belongs to somebody else. The empty bottle is more than an empty bottle. It is an embarrassing measure of how developed we really are.

You know better

The uncomfortable evidence that this is not an inability but a choice comes from Indians who live abroad. Many who might casually litter at home learn very quickly to queue, respect public spaces, follow civic rules and dispose of waste responsibly elsewhere. The DNA did not change at the airport. The social contract did. And that is perhaps the most damning evidence.

We know how to behave. We simply behave differently when we believe nobody will hold us to account. Occasionally, even the habit travels. Public spaces abroad are sometimes treated as extensions of the drawing room, celebrations spill into places never intended for them, and the assumption that enthusiasm excuses inconvenience can travel surprisingly well.

But the larger point remains. Civic sense is not something Indians lack. It is something we selectively practise.

Enough is enough

There is nothing wrong with being generous. Quite the opposite. The outpouring of relief for Assam and other flood-ravaged parts of India is something to be proud of. But perhaps we have confused charity with citizenship. Charity is dramatic. It is visible. It feels good. It allows us to see ourselves as compassionate human beings. Citizenship is quieter. It is doing the right thing when nobody is watching, nobody is photographing it and nobody is going to thank you.

It is understanding that the road outside your house is not somebody else’s road. That the river is not somebody else’s river. That the mountain is not somebody else’s mountain. That the garbage you throw away does not cease to be your responsibility merely because it has left your hand.

You want to be a developed country? Start with your empty bottle. For development is not only airports, expressways, metros, satellites and GDP. It is the discipline to live responsibly among other people. The water sent to flood victims was an act of compassion. What happens to the empty bottle is an act of citizenship. The floods will eventually recede. The water will be consumed. The cameras will move on. The bottles will remain. As will the habits that produced them.

Perhaps it is time we stopped asking who will clean up after India. And started asking why India keeps expecting somebody else to.