Friday
Jun062008
India
6 Jun 2008
I’ve been in Mumbai, India for just over a week. It is the first time that I have traveled outside of the western world, which, I fully recognize, has significantly limited my ability to understand the world. I’m here visiting Rameez who is conducting dissertation research related to migration within India; she’s been here for seven weeks now and has a flat, a set of friends, and a work schedule. It makes this three week trip seem like less of a vacation and rather more like I am briefly transitioning my normal existence across the world. My daily routines are similar; internet news and deli.cio.us hoarding, email, and fiction (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), with the added benefit that I get to spend parts of my day in the bars, restaurants, streets, and flats of the largest city in India. I don’t speak more than a few words of Hindi, but fortunately Rameez is basically a native speaker (she speaks Urdu natively, which is basically the same language for everyday purposes). Although I’m sure I could exist on my own here with some effort, she’s such an expert at navigating the city I tend to avoid going anywhere by myself.
From the first minute that I stepped into the city I have wanted to know how it worked. I’m interested from a tourist mindset, sure, but I really want to try to see what aspects of this city—the culture, infrastructure, laws, everything—held lessons in applied sustainability for Americans. Of course, I was interested in the opposite as well: where does an American lifestyle fare better from a sustainability standpoint?
There is a huge income gap in Mumbai between the rich and the poor. While there is also a huge income gap in the US, it is dramatically more visible here, where 70% of the city lives in slums with no running water. Because much of Rameez’s work centers on slum-dwellers, I had the opportunity to visit the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi, for an hour or so. It was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. While the living conditions are appalling, the residents are very productive members of the Mumbai economy. They make novelty items, are service providers (home staff, taxi drivers, etc.), and they repurpose and repair all sorts of things.
Significantly, the reason why all of this activity takes place, this after-market repurposing and recycling, is that there are people that are poor enough that it makes economic sense to undertake such activity. When it is possible for a family of four to live on RS 5,000 / month (about $120), fixing a suitcase is an economically rational decision. When 10 - 20 times that amount still puts you on the edge of poverty within the US, that same economic rationality is flipped on its head. The expected value of every hour spent in search of a job at McDonald’s is higher than that fixing suitcases.
I would hardly argue that we need decrease our standard of living to align economic incentives with desirable goals, but we need to recognize that a high standard of living has certain inherent drawbacks when attempting to change the way that we live. John McCain made comments during an appearance on The Daily Show almost a year ago now related to the stereotype that “illegal immigrants only do the kinds of work that Americans don’t want to do”. He said he took offense at that statement and that Americans aren’t above doing hard work. I don’t know if we are or aren’t, but we do tend to be economically rational thinkers on the whole. If we are going to build ourselves a more sustainable economy, one of the things that we are going to need to figure out how to do is to put fair prices on all sorts of labor; prices that will incent individuals to perform it. What if, similar to a carbon tax, there were to be an “inorganic trash tax”, whereby any individual or business throwing out a plastic or metal (non-decomposable) item had to fund its deconstruction and recycling? If we stopped externalizing the costs of waste, people would create and dispose of waste more responsibly, and there would be economic value behind services meant to keep items in service rather than throwing them out.
From the first minute that I stepped into the city I have wanted to know how it worked. I’m interested from a tourist mindset, sure, but I really want to try to see what aspects of this city—the culture, infrastructure, laws, everything—held lessons in applied sustainability for Americans. Of course, I was interested in the opposite as well: where does an American lifestyle fare better from a sustainability standpoint?
There is a huge income gap in Mumbai between the rich and the poor. While there is also a huge income gap in the US, it is dramatically more visible here, where 70% of the city lives in slums with no running water. Because much of Rameez’s work centers on slum-dwellers, I had the opportunity to visit the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi, for an hour or so. It was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. While the living conditions are appalling, the residents are very productive members of the Mumbai economy. They make novelty items, are service providers (home staff, taxi drivers, etc.), and they repurpose and repair all sorts of things.
- In one Mumbai slum that borders the city’s largest landfill, one of the largest occupations is that of the trash picker, someone who roots through the massive piles of trash in search of any sort of reusable product or recyclable material. Trash pickers know exactly what to do with the items that they find to turn them into cash, and they make sure that nothing of any value remains in the landfill.
- On streets throughout the business district there are people who fix shoes. The services are so cheap and convenient that it actually makes sense to repair a shoe as opposed to replacing it.
- There is an entire street dedicated to luggage sales and repair. People working on the street on this street will repair all manner of problems with luggage and have spare parts scavenged off of countless discarded suitcases ready to be drafted into service.
Significantly, the reason why all of this activity takes place, this after-market repurposing and recycling, is that there are people that are poor enough that it makes economic sense to undertake such activity. When it is possible for a family of four to live on RS 5,000 / month (about $120), fixing a suitcase is an economically rational decision. When 10 - 20 times that amount still puts you on the edge of poverty within the US, that same economic rationality is flipped on its head. The expected value of every hour spent in search of a job at McDonald’s is higher than that fixing suitcases.
I would hardly argue that we need decrease our standard of living to align economic incentives with desirable goals, but we need to recognize that a high standard of living has certain inherent drawbacks when attempting to change the way that we live. John McCain made comments during an appearance on The Daily Show almost a year ago now related to the stereotype that “illegal immigrants only do the kinds of work that Americans don’t want to do”. He said he took offense at that statement and that Americans aren’t above doing hard work. I don’t know if we are or aren’t, but we do tend to be economically rational thinkers on the whole. If we are going to build ourselves a more sustainable economy, one of the things that we are going to need to figure out how to do is to put fair prices on all sorts of labor; prices that will incent individuals to perform it. What if, similar to a carbon tax, there were to be an “inorganic trash tax”, whereby any individual or business throwing out a plastic or metal (non-decomposable) item had to fund its deconstruction and recycling? If we stopped externalizing the costs of waste, people would create and dispose of waste more responsibly, and there would be economic value behind services meant to keep items in service rather than throwing them out.
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