Just throw it out mindset spoils Dharamsala’s beauty

Nancy Metashvili

In common with many beauty spots whose popularity has outstripped their infrastructure, Dharamsala has a garbage problem.

Wind your way along the roads lined with majestic trees, enjoy the cool fresh mountain air, but don’t look down. The roadsides are lined with rubbish. The verdant hillsides are polluted with cascades of ugly, insanitary, fecklessly tossed trash.

It seems the visitors who arrive by the thousands and rave over the beauty and tranquility of Himachal cannot/do not notice the damage they are inflicting. The casual tossing of bottles and wrappers out of car windows is a constant in tourist season. Liquor bottles congregate in nasty little piles like uncouth delinquents on street corners.

The serene forest atmosphere of McLeodGanj and Bhagsu is constantly shattered by the incessant horning of those who are unable to wait patiently while the traffic jams (that they are causing) get unblocked.

There are a couple of organisations working to deal with these problems, as well as a number of unsung heroes who randomly pick up trash as they walk along. I do this when on my way to the dumpster, and know a few others who do. Sadly, foreigners all!

One organisation is the CUDP (Clean Upper Dharamsala Project). It is a Tibetan-run programme, a branch of the Tibetan Settlement Office. Founded in 1994, they are caught in a bureaucratic nightmare trying to implement programmes, as the responsibility for sanitation actually lies with the Dharamsala Municipal Council. This council is perceived as failing to actively deal with the many and rising problems. The CUPD is funded by donations, many from the office of the Dalai Lama, and has many international volunteers who come to involve themselves in green awareness campaigns. I’ve seen a street full of fresh-faced blond youth from Denmark chanting “Be fantastic, stop burning plastic” and “2018 Make India Green” and such enthusiastic slogans.

But it is hard going. There is a lack of interest; a huge difficulty in changing people’s ingrained habits.

The CUDP has two coordinators, 26 sweepers, five green workers, and two drivers. They have three trucks, one dumper placer, one dry waste truck and one wet waste truck.  There are eight dumpsters from where the trash is collected. Alas, these are usually in a hideous state. Issues include monkeys, dogs and cows going through the garbage looking for food, because the lids to the skips have allegedly been “stolen by rag pickers”. When the bins are overflowing, people have no choice but to add their ordure to the growing piles surrounding the skips.

They have a mass clean-up two times a month, a Spring Fair, a paper recycling workshop, the Green Shop and their trucks which come around to empty the skips. The office of HH the Dalai Lama donates the truck service. There is also a house-to-house collection of dry waste, “khe nyi kampo” with five Green Workers.

But the organisation currently has a Rs 5 lakh deficit. Foreigners who come often comment how dirty the town is, and some blame the Dalai Lama. The environmental problem has only been so bad since the tourist boom of the 1990s began. (Note bene: when I was here in 1969, there was nary a bit of trash to be seen!) 

Before the monsoon season, which is almost upon us now, the CUDP and another group, Waste Warriors, collaborate in a joint river clean-up.

This other NGO working on the garbage problem is Waste Warriors. Founded in 2012 by Jodie Underhill from the UK, they are doing their work mostly in Bhagsu, the waterfall and on up to Triund. Unlike the other group, they have no trucks, but use human labour for collecting. Walking up in the hills, one meets these gallant workers bent under enormous sacks. There are waste warrior litterbins all over Bhagsu, and attempts to deal with the hideous mess (litter, liquor bottles, and human faeces) up at Triund. As Chirag Mahajan, the project manager, says “the problems are crazy, complex”.

Despite collecting 180 tons of waste (35 per cent of which is recyclable — profits go to the Green Workers) more appears every day.

Outreach and advocacy, education, school programmes, wall paintings and even eco art make little impact when the mentality is to just throw it out.

“Walking on egg shells,” says one CUDP associate, seeing the problem as political as well as a personal lack of social responsibility.

But when little children and animals get cut on broken glass, when intestinal illnesses are caused by polluted rivers, and the municipal dump spontaneously ignites every summer from its methane, we all must recognise that the problem is serious. 

It is for us all to take our part, do our best and then go beyond our best. Our environment and our very lives depend on it.

Chirag Mahajan of Waste Warriors feels “a definite sense of progress”.

Let this be true.

The genesis of the problem lies in two initiatives taken by both the Centre and the state in the past decade to introduce alternative models of hospitality. In 2008, the HP Tourism Department came out with the Home Stay scheme in a bid to disperse tourists away from its crowded towns to the rural areas. These units were given concessions of several kinds, but the caveat was that they could operate only in rural areas. 

In 2009, the GOI came out with its own B+B scheme. Unlike the better-focused Himachal scheme, the B+B scheme was silent about the applicability of taxes or utility tariffs. The state regulatory structure was completely by-passed, the state’s own Home Stay scheme ignored: even the registration of the B+B units was to be done by the central ministry, not the state Tourism Department. 

(Nancy Metashvili from Alaska is a globe-trotter, writer, musician and poet)