Indian Railways' Garbage Problem

A few years ago, I was riding in open-seating on a short-haul train between major metros. The precise place doesn’t matter much; this scene could have played itself out anywhere. I was by the window, and in the window seat across from me sat an obviously affluent, middle-aged woman. She was snacking incessantly throughout the journey. As she finished each morsel, she would casually toss its plastic bag or wrapper out the open window. When she purchased a cup of chai from the passing chai-wallah, it was a safe bet that the plastic cup would also be headed out the window.

It was more than I could stand; and though it was not premeditated, when she aimed the cup out the window, I instinctively reached out and caught it, scalding my hand with the remains of the chai in the process. The woman was shocked and angry, and lashed out at me. What the hell was I doing? She was simply disposing of trash!

I began a harsh, but even-toned rhetorical inquiry. “Why would you throw trash from the train? Are you so important that someone else should have to pick-up after you? Do you have so little self-respect that you are untroubled living amid garbage?”

The woman was unrepentant, and she seized on this last question with such defiance and obvious satisfaction, she clearly believed she had routed the debate. “I don’t live here,” she said.

“Look out the window,” I continued. “Many people live where you are throwing your trash. Don’t you have any consideration for the people who must live amid the garbage you throw?” Most rail passengers, like most of India’s urban population, seem to care little or nothing for anyone but themselves.

“Do you want to turn your country into a garbage pit? Do you hate your country so much?”

The impugning of an Indian’s patriotism gets them every time. Sure enough, the woman apologized and asked for the plastic cup back. I told her that she had lost all rights to the cup, but that I would hold it in until we reached the station (another hour-and-a-half, at least) and throw it into a dustbin on her behalf. I also told her that she should not apologize to me, but to her fellow passengers, whose country she had been thoughtlessly defiling. The other passengers, needless to say, had been watching this scene unfold with rapt attention.

Though I deliver variants of this sermon nearly every day I am in India, I usually do not intend to disgrace my targets as I did with this woman. With practice, my tone has become gentler, even as my message is unwavering and unforgiving. People already understand that littering is wrong; but they seem to need an object lesson – like a foreigner picking up their refuse and placing it in the nearby dustbin – to drive the point home. But on that day, I was angry, and I did all within my power to see that the woman’s humiliation was complete. In mitigation of my admitted cruelty, I will say that it is hard to ride the rails in India without feeling the bitterness which provoked my relentlessness.

Indian Railways operates the most extensive, most densely utilized train system in the world. Each year it tickets more than four billion passenger journeys, and passengers travel more than 310 trillion kilometers – over 850 billion passenger-kilometers every day. Some substantial percentage of those passenger-kilometers generates trash and human waste, almost all of which finds its way to the tracks or the landscape beyond.

The toilets on Indian trains are little more than compartments in which to squat over a hole to the track below. They are in fairly constant use. This may actually be a reasonable, if imperfect, way of disposing of such a vast quantity of human waste – distributing it along the tracks, a place guaranteed to be uninhabited, to sterilize in the searing tropical sun.



The key to this system, of course, is that passengers use the toilets when the train is moving along open stretches of track, and not standing still in the station. The toilets even have signs, remind passengers to please refrain from using them at the stations. Take a guess where many passengers prefer to use the shitter? Now, imagine what the average Indian railway station smells like.



The great Gandhian civil engineer, Ishwarbhai Patel, a winner of India’s prestigious Padmashri award for his lifetime of work in sanitation, actually developed a simple mechanism to eliminate this problem. Instead of falling directly to the tracks, waste is captured in a holding tank, and only released when the train reaches intercity speeds. Indian Railways, however, never implemented this solution.

In the last two weeks, I have ridden more than 90 hours on Indian Railways trains, long-hauls between various metros. I have made an informal, non-scientific survey of the track-side landscape in the course of the journeys, looking out the window or the open doorways at the end of the cars. I have yet to observe a single one-meter stretch that is garbage-free, even in the most remote countryside.

The passengers are not the only ones to blame for this disgusting state-of-affairs. Indian Railways – the Government of India, itself – is a leading distributor of trash along the track.

On long-haul routes, Indian Railways trains include a catering car, and tray-loads of hot meals are served in first, second, and third-sleeper classes. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to learn how many such meals are served by the railways. Many. When the finished meals are collected by the porters, the trays are taken to the space between the bogeys, where there is a small opening to the tracks, and the trash – uneaten food, plastic bags, aluminum containers, plastic cups – is dumped from the moving train.



Indian Railways is not only guilty of littering the Indian landscape, it also seems to seek the active complicity of even its most well-meaning passengers by failing to provide adequate dustbins on the trains or at station platforms. The on-train bins, one at either end of the bogey, have a capacity of less than 8 liters. They quickly fill and overflow; and once spilling onto the floor, the floor becomes a magnet for further trash.



How is train trash ultimately cleaned-up? Much of it, of course, isn’t. It blows into the fields and open-spaces, rivers and streams, and streets and alleyways along the tracks, joining litter from other sources. Garbage is quite simply ubiquitous in India.

At the stations, cleaners are hired to pick trash from amid the muck of feces and urine.



At some station stops, street children with brooms board the train to sweep the floors of the compartments for tips from the passengers. Everyone seems comfortable with this system; but should seven year old children really be responsible for picking up after adults?

On journeys of more than one day, there is usually a stop at which the tiny dustbins are emptied, and the toilets hosed-down, by a contractor to the railway. The trains are also swept of garbage at the terminus, before they begin a new journey. I have no idea what becomes of the trash removed from the trains at these points.

Some of the garbage is collected for recycling. In India, most trash recycling is accomplished by the informal system of rag-picking. The poorest-of-the-poor sift through the piles of garbage in India’s streets, and along its rail lines, to collect the plastics that can be sold. It is nasty, unhealthy, back-breaking work, which barely earns the rag-pickers a subsistence income.



None of this ever crosses the mind of people like the woman with whose story I began this post. And if it did, it wouldn’t bother them in the least. Their trash is someone else’s problem.