How India is slowly moving away from sustainable development

There is hardly any place now a days where you don’t hear the echo of global warming messages. Scientist claims that the world is getting hotter and a very delicate balance of the eco-system is getting disturbed leading to catastrophic changes in the climate.

It looks like the summer is getting hotter and the winter is getting colder. The 5 hottest year in California happened just in the last decade. Similarly, the last 5 hottest year in Patna happens to be all in the last decade. All this is happening when countries across the globe are trying to reduce carbon footprint. Is this effort coming a little too late? Have we already crossed the tipping point?

As the disposable income in India is rising, and so is the appetite to mimic westernized world to embrace the modern day comforts without thinking what could be the long term effect of such choices. A slight introspection of my own lifestyle when I was growing up shows the sustainable life we were leading in India just 2 decades back that now is getting increasingly forgotten in the hum drum of blindly copying everything American. I am certain there are multiple such simple and common examples that my readers can contribute.

Multi Use Bag / Baskets : I remember having 2 or 3 multi use bags / baskets in my home just till a couple of decades back that would remain is use for years. These bags were either made of clothes or jutes and used to last very long time. These bags used to be washed regularly and were reused for every day’s groceries to any other adhoc purchases. There was hardly any plastic and hence no need to recycle anything. Just imagine for a moment how long will it take for all the households in US to revert back to multi use bags after getting used to the convenience of single use and throw plastic bags. While every county in US is trying to ban the use of plastic bags, we in India were already leading a sustainable life without the need to think of recycling plastic. However, in our effort to catch up to the modern day living we forgot our roots and blindly copied western culture and have since then landed in a soup as we still lack the sophistication and will power of the west to recycle materials.

Regular Blankets : When I was growing up, each year our community would be invariably visited by weavers around fall who were skilled in cleaning raw cotton that used to be stuffed inside the blanket / comforters for providing warmth. These weavers would take all blankets from a household, open the sutures of blanket and take out all the cotton. They used to then beat the cotton with the help of a string (like when you play a guitar and vibrate the strings of guitar). After doing this repeatedly for some time, the bad cotton used to get segregated from the good ones. The loss of bad cotton used to be compensated by adding new cotton that these weavers used to carry with them. Finally, they would put all the cotton inside the blankets, sew it up, change the blanket cover if you so desire and you are ready for the next winter in style. This way of recycling cotton used to save a lot of wastages unlike now when the old blankets/comforters are discarded for a brand new one. Don’t you think that it was a more sustainable way of living than discarding the entire blanket/comforters and contributing to the global warming? If yes, then why we are continuing to move towards one time only use & throw concepts and ruining our future generations with wastes that would be extremely difficult to properly dispose.

Carpets: If you have visited anyone in the United States, you will invariably find wall to wall carpet in most of the homes. Each and every floor of offices/malls in the western world is lined with carpets. If you think for a moment then you will realize that these carpets are energy hugger because of the need of using vacuum cleaner to clean them. However, there is atleast a reason in countries like US to extensively used carpets given very cold temperatures. India, however, is blessed with tropical climate. Then why are we increasingly using the carpets in India? There were hardly any floors in India that were built using carpets when I was growing up. The floors were invariably made of concrete and/or marble.. Carpets were used just for decorative purpose. Have you ever noticed why the western world has very high level of allergies than any where else in the world inspite of such a high standard of living? One of the reason is the carpets that traps lots of pathogens and bacteria that just sits there. It’s a double whammy – on the one hand lots of energy is used to vacuum clean the carpet and on the other hand, we see very high incidence of allergies that needs billions of dollars of medical care every year. I am a little disappointed to see that many urban households in India are similarly moving towards increasing use of carpets when it’s long term use will only increase global warming and increasingly deteriorate the health of the people.

While we can’t unwind the clock and go back in time it is completely within our control to slowly remove products and life style practices that contribute even remotely to unsustainable living.