Taming the trash

Published March 7, 2018
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

IT has happened. The government of Sindh, long maligned and often negligent, has finally done something brave and praiseworthy. A few days ago, it promulgated an order imposing a ban on the dumping of household, industrial and hospital waste out in the open areas of the city. Then it did something more; it actually enforced that ban. Three days after the imposition of the order, two men who were throwing garbage out on the road in Karachi’s Old City area were arrested by the Sindh police. They were booked under the Pakistan Penal Code’s Section 188, which punishes disobedience to an order promulgated by a public servant. According to reports, similar actions were taken in other parts of the city that are also plagued by piles of rotting and fetid garbage, endangering everyone around.

It is certainly time for this. As someone who had the misfortune of growing up next to an open area, one that was duly treated as a garbage dump by the rest of the very affluent neighbourhood, I can personally attest to the lack of consideration and complete impunity with which everything from the innards of sacrificed animals to old mattresses to rubble from construction was dumped next to our house. Decades of implorations and objections did not help, the neighbours didn’t care, and municipal and city officials did not care. In the meantime, the trash piled up; garbage fires burnt down a good part of our plants, and regularly filled our lungs and air with polluted smoke. None of our affluent neighbours who dumped their rubbish next to our abode (and sometimes actually in front of it) cared at all. They watched and often laughed at our helplessness.

This is the story of many neighbourhoods in Pakistan. People throw trash out of their houses and imagine it magically gone simply because it is no longer on their property. While we were inconvenienced and disgusted, the costs some others have had to pay is far greater. Almost exactly one year ago, a fire began in a heap of garbage in a narrow alley in one Karachi locality. The smoke from the fire crept inside the adjoining home and began to suffocate the family that lay sleeping inside. The father and mother managed to get out but all of their children died from smoke inhalation. Everyone shrugged and said that they had no idea how the fire in the trash heap began. The grieving mother blamed the people who dumped the trash in the alley. Garbage is not simply unsightly and unsanitary and an inconvenience, it is also deadly. There is a near infinite number of garbage-clogged alleys in the country.

Of course, those who throw the garbage, and there are millions of such entitled and selfish souls in the city, do not care about the inconvenience they cause to others. Consider, for instance, this sentiment expressed by an author who wrote to a newspaper complaining about the new rule: “Should we let it pile up and rot in our homes?” he inquired angrily, while insisting that the new practice of arresting offenders is “no solution”. It should be the duty of city and provincial officials to gather up the trash from kachra kundis, and develop waste management systems to dispose of the city’s trash.

People throw garbage out of their houses and imagine it magically gone simply because it is no longer on their property.

Such sentiments, representative as they are of the uncivil and educated in the city, those who pretend to care for all but really are just bothered with their own convenience, are misguided. The reason is simple: along with dumping trash in every open space, road, roundabout and alley in the city, most residents of the city also do not pay taxes. The consequence is that punishments for civic failures have to be imposed directly on the efforts via arrests, bails and fines, rather than via the tax that is, in other more honest societies, the resource base for providing them.

Second, even in countries like the United States, where city taxes are paid, most residents pay private garbage collectors to come and collect it from their homes. In sum, no service is free, and trash collection is a service. The random appointment of whatever and whichever open space of the city that suits this or that person and so is declared the neighbourhood trash dump is not a solution — it is an imposition. If garbage smells bad rotting inside your home, it smells just as bad to those who have to smell it when it is outside your home.

The arrest of garbage dumpers is not a novel solution to end illegal trash disposal. Pakistanis love to wax lyrical over the wonders of Singapore, its cleanliness and its orderliness. Singapore too arrests and punishes those who throw garbage on city streets, as do several states in the US. In some cases, those arrested are actually made to walk up and down city streets and pick up the garbage that others have dumped so that they can develop a civic conscience and realise the cost they impose on other people every time they throw their plastic bags of filth into the open.

The days are getting hotter in Karachi, the rains will soon be here. If the spread of diseases is to be curbed, if rainwater is not to be contaminated by hospital and industrial and household waste as it floods homes and alleys, then cracking down on garbage dumpers must continue. Karachi, it seems, has made considerable effort to inculcate some sort of a civic sense in its residents. As the waste- and rubbish-filled city streets show, nearly every effort has failed. It is time therefore to pursue the nuclear option; the real and actual threat of being arrested may be the only thing that can force citizens or inhabitants of Karachi to be clean and considerate. Perhaps then we will be able to see a difference between the trash that is thrown out and the trash that so unthinkingly throws it.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2018

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