India - Part 9 - The challenges

India has challenges, like all countries do, its compounded by the multipliers interwoven into emerging market realities, and enhanced by its vast population.  It is also a country of triumphs: the worlds largest functioning democracy; grinding poverty, yet with relatively low levels of crime; optimism and gentility, despite it all. But for a visitor, momentarily freed from the path beaten between hotel and meeting-place, the thing that is very hard to comprehend is the casual degradation of the environment.  It just seems to make everything so much harder, and so much of it seems pointless.  Fires for heat and cooking are necessary, on some level.  Factories that absolutely spew shit into the air and the water are not.   We rode through a town called Vapi, which I was told is the most polluted city in India. Delhi has the externalised reputation of  having filthy air (no doubt it does) but Vapi's super-industrialised nature makes it consistently worse.  In that regard, it is as if people are disposable. I can only imagine the impact that the pollution has on the people living and working there.  It seems unlikely that the cost of health-care and loss of productivity makes economic sense - unless people are fungible and disposable - and perhaps they are, in some crude economic way - but the suffering that comes with that is real and unnecessary.  

Plastic, which litters absolutely everything, everywhere near a human settlement, seems stupidly and pointlessly subtractive.  It thoroughly tarnishes a sheen that its beauty as a country should have.  I doubt India uses proportionately more plastic per capita than other nations of similar economic standing, but it is hyper cavalier about where it is thrown.  Is a litter-free country that buries its plastic any better?  I think it is.  It's at least a concentration of an outcome of a problem (though the concentration does have the limitation of not confronting the people generating that waste with the scale of the problem, something very much the case in the United States).  Given the great will of its people, and determination of its leadership, it seems an obvious thing to address.  But as a species, we are all frogs-in-a-pot, and people get rapidly used to the things that are pick-pocketing their lives and potential.

Metaphoric, and pretty grim; last resting place of a dog, perhaps hit on the highway;
last resting place of a bottle, perhaps flung from one of its vehicles.

The taxi rank; a double entendre.

Looking like something from District 9; outside the Hotel Fun City.

The outside and inside of the filters after a morning (at most).