Mumbai is a Dump, Literally

Let’s just say that I did not have the best of homecomings… another day, another fight with a cabbie trying to rip me off. It also didn’t help that after two days of staying in a 5-star hotel I was resuming my ½-star existence.

Anyway, one of the things that I particularly liked about Bangalore was its relatively cleanliness. Sure, there was still some litter on the ground in the park, but there was a conspicuous absence of the huge mounds on garbage dumped on the side of the roads as is the case in Mumbai. I opened this morning’s Times of India to find an article on exactly this issue entitled, “Piling up: Mumbai’s debris problem”. The article goes on to say that 10,000 tonnes of solid waste are generated in Mumbai each day, but only 2,500 tonnes are dumped daily at dumping grounds, leaving 7,500 tonnes to litter Mumbai’s city streets. Much of the waste is from construction projects in the city and is surreptitiously dumped in the middle of the night along Mumbai’s highways. The article goes on to say that they are trying to put some sort of regulatory scheme in place whereby dump truck owners have to register their trucks and obtain approvals before dumping. Good luck with that one, I sure you are going to get lots of cooperation there…

I am usually willing to give India some slack for the challenges of development, but this is disgusting. The fact that there are educated people socially-aware enough to write about this topic and that nothing has been done for this long is unacceptable. In my opinion it’s totally garbage.