A Personal Experience:
It was on February 12, 2011 my proud journey to Allahabad began. I was going to attend my first conference and was terribly excited. With it was the pleasure of a 2500 km journey by Indian Railways. Indian Railways which operates the most extensive train system in the world is the country's pride in many sense. It contains, as its website claims has some of the most spectacular & unforgettable journeys in the world. So I was obviously very excited.But it did not take me long to notice that there was something distinctively wrong about the system. Within 3-4 hours I without doubt had seen kgs of plastic being thrown off into the open track. Being aware of the plastic story I was soon seriously concerned and pledged that I wouldn't dump plastic so. So, instead of throwing off plastic and other things which I had bought I placed them with the food serving plates of the pantry. For they were taken away from us time to time by the pantry staff. Was that a solution? I was surprised to see a NO!
When I went on to discover what pantry staff did with that garbage, it hit me as a shock as they continually collected garbage and threw it to the tracks just like my fellow passengers. By pledge was now broken. Still, I thought, I could hold on. I saw a dust bin below the wash basin in each compartment(That is the usual construct) and from then whatever plastic I needed to dispose, I put it into that dust bin. I believed that it would be emptied in some major station. Some clean and green station- probably I thought, Itarsi. But only in the return journey I could find out that when the train reaches its end-point, the garbage is disposed of, not at the Railway station, but before the railway station! Yet again on the track!
What happens to the garbage?
Well. That was my story! Now, what happens to that garbage? I figured it out myself while I saw heaps of plastic burning aside the tracks, through out my journey. They weren't carried away. Now what about the statistics? Each year Indian Railways tickets more than four billion passenger journeys, and passengers travel more than 310 trillion kilometers – over 850 billion passenger-kilometers every day. Some substantial percentage of those passenger-kilometers generates trash and human waste, almost all of which finds its way to the tracks or the landscape beyond. We have a system in this country to produce mountains of plastic and other garbage and burn them through out thousands of kilometers.
Even in the most remote and secluded places the dumping follows. Indian Railways lacks a system of garbage disposal and it follows in all beautiful places it goes! Even the remote forests, hills, rivers and farmlands! everywhere!
What can be done?
Several solutions can be offered to the issue and has been offered. Each compartment can have a wastage collection tank underneath and can be emptied in major stations. Well. There are simpler solutions to the problem. But the important problem is authorities and people are surprisingly not interested! There isn't enough material on it even on the internet! People have to wake up.
1. Next time, you travel on Indian Railways, if its a short journey or whenever possible, can you make a pledge with us? Can you collect 'your' plastic or other garbage till the next station and throw it in the dust bin there? Do it!
2. Write to the authorities, write to influential people. Write again and again. The more we write, the better is the hope.
-Subramanya Hegde,
HGB
See Also:
*An article on the same by Mark Jacobs at http://desicritics.org/2007/08/17/023330.php
*See a question on this at yahoo answer and the poor response
