I went
on a heritage walk in the Charminar area. It involved picking my way through filthy
streets to avoid litter, garbage, traffic, slush, and shit, and contriving to look
up at intervals to glimpse the heritage structures I was there for. It was
awful. My sense of belonging in Hyderabad may have seen me through some of the
discomfort, but my friend from out of town didn’t have that buoy. I felt a
blend of sympathy for her and embarrassment on Hyderabad’s behalf throughout
the trip.
How can
we get away with interpreting filth as quaint and cultural, and worthy of
immersion in to get the true feel of a place? All the while, paradoxically, we
get affronted when outsiders call our places filthy. Dirt, as in dust, mud,
sand, gravel, may be mildly romantic. What is not is stinky garbage, poor municipal
sanitation, thoughtless construction of roads and pavements, and bodily wastes
on streets. Roadside eateries where food and beverage spills are wiped up with
the same rag as the seats you are ushered into are not confidence-building.
Wastes
have changed – in quality and quantity. People’s ways of dealing with them
haven’t. The result is hillocks and streams of unsightly, and dangerous,
garbage all over, particularly in celebrated places bursting with “culture”,
unless the place has been taken under the wing of a foundation that cleans it
up, restores it, and charges a fee to keep it visitable.
It is too
easy to blame people for littering. But it doesn’t come naturally not to
litter. The environment — physical, and socio-political — plays a vital
initiating and maintaining role in such practices. If there aren’t user-friendly
urban infrastructure designs; good urban sanitation policies, facilities and enforcement of rules; handy receptacles for wastes of different sorts; reminders
at points-of-decision while the new behaviour is learned; and inspiration from
role-models, not to mention pride in one’s home and surroundings, it is too
much to expect people to keep their neighbourhoods clean, particularly when
they have spent years adapting new wastes to old styles of disposal, e.g., flicking
a plastic wrapper away like they used to flick the leaf and blade of grass that
held snacks together in the old days.
This
is a failure of intersectoral collaboration, preceded, unfortunately, by
failures of each sector’s work. The tourism department puts its resources into
organising visitor-friendly guided routes and schedules to showcase the architectural
beauties of a place, and gets dismally let down by a set of other government departments,
e.g., the local governance, traffic police, roads and buildings. Some more thought and concerted action are needed to make places habitable, visitable, and worthy of their attractive tags.
