Mumbai embraces its booming flamingo population

Where I live every house has a garbage can in front, trucks pick it up once a week, and every public space has multiple garbage cans that get emptied on a regular schedule. I didn't set the system up, and other than paying a bill every few months I'm not involved in running the system. Nobody is. It's provided for us and we take advantage of it. I visited Mumbai and Pune last year, and I saw the trash problem first hand, but I have a hard time pinning the problem on apathy versus simply not having a functioning sanitation system. In other words, if you take the most well-meaning person, leave them holding a piece of trash, then deprive them of anywhere to dispose of it, where do you think it's going to go?

> As an expat, my reason is simple. Apathy!

I think it is not mere apathy but learned apathy. There is no way for the people to know who to hold accountable. The political structure is a mess. It's not even googleable.

In addition, most people don't know that they need to constantly harass their representative to get things done.

Lastly, after many decades of political decay, most rich people only clean up their high rise societies. No one fights for public streets.

That's why there are few traffic lights, no lanes on streets, no crosswalks, ruthless traffic etc. People need up-to-date websites with contact details of elected representatives so that the representatives can be spammed to death about their inaction.

I'm an expat Indian, been an American citizen for ~25 years, and have worked/traveled all over India. Agree on the apathy, but I think it's a bit more nuanced than the notion of apathy one might have around here.

In America, you are very likely to be admonished by a stranger for littering in a public place. Trash cans are everywhere, and the laws/regulations are enforced, so the risk-reward of littering/pollution is overwhelmingly in favor of proper disposal. Most of the population doesn't have to work 14-16 hour days, 6-7 days a week, so there's a lot of volunteered time to go around for maintaining public areas. There is public funding and enforced regulations to handle waste management, and industry employees have union representation.

India is diametrically opposite to this - it would be risky to admonish someone for littering, especially if they look wealthy, because rich Indians are usually above the law and consider themselves so. Everyone bribes the police, so anyone can pollute the environment for a price. In everyday life, the tragedy of the commons is certainly prevalent - there's already a pile of trash, so one more wrapper makes no difference. But there is also apathy in the sense that you're not going to admonish the person dumping a rickshaw full of trash into the river, because that's the only realistic way for him to feed his family, and it's probably the only economical option over dumping it somewhere yourself. And there isn't much evidence that paying more in taxes is going to do anything for the problem, and a lot of evidence that it will just line your local politician's pockets. The people who actually do the work are usually the poorest in society, and they don't know the dangers of lighting carcinogenic materials on fire.

To summarize with an anecdote - I saw my uncle throw an empty chip bag on a beautiful beach in Goa, so I picked it up and asked him why he couldn't just hold on to it for a while. He shouted back, "it's someone else's job to pick that up!"

Why does this principle apply to India but not say Japan, Sweden, or Singapore?

This makes sense. Steve Jobs famously observes this stark contrast during his india trip too.

Though one can ask why this can’t be true of any ‘world-denying’ religion too? Judaism? Christianity? Why bother with physical cleanliness in this life when you’re gunning for salvation in the next one?

> religious leaders were so obsessed with the idea of ritual purity and pollution that physical cleanliness took a beating. It is not easy to understand even for an Indian.

Yeah, no. You see the same happening in poorer parts of South East Asia and Africa.

This depends on religion - Sikh temples are cleaned every day, are usually immaculate white, and incorporate foot washing into every entrance. It's pretty marvelous to see how efficiently a group of ~100 volunteers clean the Golden Temple in Amritsar every day - whoever happens to be around at 3 pm might grab a broom, bucket, or stand in the holy pool to fill buckets of water. The surrounding city and state (Punjab) is much cleaner than you would find elsewhere in India.

What a xenophobic statement. I’m in the UK and I see exactly the same thing here with trash abandoned all over the streets. That’s before you look at the filthy state of our rivers with businesses brazenly dumping waste.

What’s the excuse here then?

Japanese culture also has a number of "ritual purity" elements, such as taking shoes from outside off in the genkan (vestibule) before stepping into the main part of a house, and ritual cleansing with water when visiting a shrine. I understand that Japan is far more economically advantaged than India, but even so, the difference in how clean things are between New York City (for example) and any major city in Japan is quite stark. [I'm from the US but lived in Japan for a year. Haven't been to India but I know a lot of people from there.]

It leans heavy toward being cultural: Japan got rid of most public trashcans after an extremist group attacked civilians with sarin gas, some decades ago. The streets remained as trash-free as usual. On the other hand after work, at night, you may see a manager passed out with a pool of puke in a subway car… on the other hand it gets cleaned up pronto at the terminus and the car will be clean and his wallet won't go mysteriously missing.

There are laws against dumping trash and sewage into creeks which do not get enforced.

City corporations need money to enforce the laws and clean stuff up but housing taxes continue to remain disproportionately low and people don’t pay that either.

I'm not Indian but here's an observation:

Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan do not have any cities with 5+ million people. In fact, the most populated cities in those nations do not even exceed 1 million people.

> sheer size and population of the cities combined with government and citizen apathy, lack of manpower*,

This is something I see often. How come with a large population there is a shortage of manpower?

You see the same sort of thing in the UK, lots of people, high unemployment (more than twice what we have here in Norway), and yet there is a large amount of obvious work that needs doing like insulating houses and fixing holes in the road.

there is a catch-22 that must be broken somehow (with some initial outside injection of funds) but if people appreciate the service it enters a virtuous circle: the people working on garbage disposal get salaries, they consume more and pay taxes, the taxes support municipal services which pay the salaries and the loop is closing.

people tend to discount how strong this circular effect is in the economy and implicitly assume that money is found under a rock (or stolen) and is essentially finite. there is some truth to that the sense that if the products or services people want depend on scarce natural resources (e.g. oil) then this creates a constraint. but for large parts of the economy the potential resides in our brains.

not a specific blame at all as this applies everywhere, just to different degrees. think about art for example. we have only as much art as we think is important because all artists must live from the rest of us. but if people think its important and they somehow get paid, they contribute to general welfare with their own demands etc.

its by no means trivial to change attitudes and there can be many other events that can derail those positive loops. but the general principle is something that should be appreciated more because that is ultimately how all wealth is built.