How is this justice?

Solid waste management (SWM) seems to be the most sensitive issue after water in the city context. In villages especially if you have farms all your wet waste goes to the farm directly. No service of waste collection is necessary in such setting. But what happens to the waste generated by every citizen in the city? Why isn’t the onus of taking care of the generated waste come on the respective citizen? Why does the PMC have to provide this service?

Looking at the cities, every time, I remember Shumaker’s small is beautiful. The forces of making the city big are so big that how do we adhere to the small? So while growing in terms of population, area, economy, products and services the cities move away from the basic natural services available and necessary for the survival of life, something like water, raw material for food. It’s such a stark contrast which very few urban citizens realize.

SO our water comes from at least 50 km away from the dams built by drowning hundreds of villages and shifting another hundreds and  rehabilitating very few of them. Our grains, veggies and fruits come from the nearby villages and national, international places, thanks to transport facilities and LPG (liberalisation, privatization and globalisation). So the 2 basic needs of water and food are taken care of not by us but by somebody else who get low and uncertain prices for the farm produce, curse of the middle class if the prices rise beyond a certain limit. The third need of shelter, Not Abudana but Ashiyana of the cities are built by the bricks made by irreversible processing of top soil most important for growing of the food.

So we rip the natural resources available in the countryside and become ‘rich’ in the cities. What do we give back to them? What do we have, to give back? The sewage starting from our toilets directly connected to the rivers which flows to these villages supplying water for drinking, washing and farming directly (without any cleaning plants in between) and sometimes if the Sewage Treatment Plants are working generously, a good dose of chlorine to kill the bacteria from the black water which also can harm the other life in the river. The un-segregated waste we generate finds its way on the fertile lands of these villages making the villagers and the waste pickers susceptible to all kinds of health hazards.

How is this justice? We take from them all that is good and in return give them all that is bad.

What is the solution? Leave the cities? Is that possible?

How about making the cities sustainable? Is that even conceivable? What does that mean at the value level and at the practice level?