© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Before I begin this post, let me confess that I use Ola once in a while. In fact, I was sitting in an Ola cab at a traffic jam when the scene I am about to narrate happened. The vehicle in front of me was a medium-sized truck, and from the exterior it was clear that this truck carried garbage. In that case, why did I give it a second glance? Because there was a man inside! In the garbage part of the van (not the driver side which I anyway couldn’t see), beside the pile of black garbage bags with their mouths tied, this lanky guy stood bent over, his jeans pushed up to his knees, his hands working furiously. He picked out mineral water bottles – the smaller kind that we usually see at parties and throw away so casually – and dropped them into a big grayish bag. Each time he saw water in a bottle, he would pour it on his feet and wipe it down (to cool the heat of standing the entire time in that airless shaking truck?). What he didn’t pick from the black bag were largely paper plates and paper cups, most having some leftovers, so the waste was probably from a party. This activity went on even as the signal changed to green.

Despite all the cynicism that India’s cities (Gurgaon, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Noida) have taught me, and despite being told that “this is how the lower classes live, what is your problem, isn’t the AC in your cab running?”, I was shocked. Right in front of me stood a guy who made a living sorting out plastic bottles from garbage, standing inside a moving truck. It made me wonder: is there anything that any of us, seeing and then quickly unseeing the reality in front of us, can do? It might help to segregate waste so that workers like him do not have to repeatedly dip their hands into garbage to retrieve bottles. But segregation would relieve him of his job! Imagine we all decided to segregate our plastic and paper and wet waste. What would happen to our waste workers?

Continue reading →