My sister is a ragpicker in New Jersey. Every evening she sorts the family garbage into designated bins: biodegradables in the green bin — picked up by the municipal truck on Wednesdays, recycled glass in the blue bin, for Thursdays, and all other items for Fridays. After 12 years of the routine she is a natural Greenie. Her counterparts in Delhi have a harder task. Everyday 300,000 rag-pickers work overtime, sifting through dumps and massive landfills outside the city, pulling out reusable waste out of maggot-filled slime. In a casteless society in New Jersey such sorting can be accomplished efficiently and without a bruising of social status. But in

India, the task does not match a middle class job description. The ineptitude and humiliation of the Delhi operation marks it as one of the many scourges of a ‘modern’ society incapable of parting with its traditional truths (That rag-picking provides employment is another matter).

Today, every move up a notch on the social ladder is an ecological step in the wrong direction. For years a mug of water sufficed for the elimination of early morning bodily waste. The toilet roll dispenser was a decorative English anomaly. Today it is filled regularly with 230 yards of soft tissue culled from an Uttarakhand forest. In a middle-class house five air-conditioners hum to the tune of eight kilowatts of power — enough juice to light two villages. A driver picks up a fifteen rupee loaf of bread by driving a 3000 cc Pajero to the local market, using up two litres of fossil fuel that took three million years to form deep below the earth crust.

... contd.