My new flat
looks grand. With a promising fresh breeze flooding in from large windows that
covers the breadth of the whole wall and with excellent ventilation, I almost
marvel at my luck when I landed on this tenth floor flat. The ceiling has been
artistically done, with a large green (yes green! My landlord has bad colour
taste) POP slab ejecting out with hidden lights in them.
Sometimes I
sit all by myself at the window sill, and sip my morning tea. That’s when I
spotted the maze of blue plastic and rusted black corrugated roofs blocking my
view. When one looks straight ahead from my window, one can get a glimpse of bunched
haphazard buildings and dark outline of hills at the horizon. However when the
gaze shifts downwards, a contrast presents itself- a huge stretch of slum, the
roofs of which, as I see now, is adorned with thick blue plastic and discarded
pieces of unevenly fixed aluminum sheets (‘patra’
as the locals call it).
The contrast
is rigid. And it gets even more rigid during Monsoons.
While I fret
over rains pouring and me getting wet, my maid, who lives in a small one room
hatchment in the same slum, worries over water spilling inside her tiny
cubicle, wetting her lone sets of furniture- a bed and a TV table. Once, she
rapidly explained how horrendous her task was to pour water mug-by-mug from
inside her house.
“This is the
story of every monsoon. Water accumulates after one splash of heavy rain. But
we cover our roofs with plastic so at least the leakage reduces,” she confides.
I, for one,
have always considered plastic as a ‘hopeless’ commodity. It increases
environmental pollution, is non-biodegradable and can be replaced easily with
paper bags. However, what I absolutely missed was the irreplaceable use it
offers to the poorest of poor people. It acts like a ceiling for them, like
cement does for us. These huge plastic sheets serve the purpose of raincoat for
them like umbrella does for us.
For
slum-dwellers plastic is cheap and efficient. A meter sheet cost them anywhere
between 350 to 400 bucks, while a roof made of cement or bricks can easily
escalate to thousand of rupees.
A normal
raincoat or umbrella starts from 100-150 bucks, but a thin plastic film merely
costs 5-10 rupees. Why would they go for a more costly option such as umbrella
when they can easily wrap a piece of plastic around them during rains? Their choice
is limited-- plastic.
In India, environmentalists
protest to ban plastic, with cities like Nainital already banning its use. However,
for the lower-income group, environment has no place to stand in the ‘issue-list’
when heavy downpour threatens to float their furniture sets and a long list of
monsoon diseases- typhoid, dengue, malaria, cholera, hepatitis, leptospirosis
and gastroenteritis- lurk round the corner for two long months.
A quick
Google search told me that according to All India Plastics Manufacturers'
Association (AIPMA), domestic consumption of plastic has been growing at 10-12%
CAGR over the last decade. The plastic processing industry is expected to
touch Rs 1.3 trillion (18.9 million tones) by 2015 and increase employment to
an estimated 7 million by 2015 from the current
3.5 million-plus people.
So, as futile as this commodity is considered
to be, it is one indispensable unit in our country. In 2012, India was the
third largest consumer of plastic in the world, that says a lot, isn’t it?
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