Keya Sarkar: No more 'trash talk' in Santiniketan

As I may have mentioned in this column before, Santiniketan has no municipality. As a university town and now as a vibrant holiday destination for residents of Kolkata, infrastructure in Santiniketan has remained unchanged from what Tagore had planned a hundred years ago.

Administrative jurisdiction for this extended university town is divided between the university (for the area that it owns, including large residential areas) and the Ruppur gram panchayat.

If the university were to take on conservancy services, it could eat into the money it gets from the Centre for improving teaching facilities and is, therefore, clearly not interested, despite the growing number of students. The Ruppur gram panchayat refuses to recognise the fact that the requirements of a semi-urban area are different from that of a gram. The end result: students and tourists finish their packets of Kurkure and chuck them. Consequently, the university town is starting to look like a dump-yard.

Unable to deal with this, my partner and I had decided, soon after we shifted from Mumbai a decade ago, to take matters into our own hands, literally. For our neighbourhood of about 150 households, we decided to run a garbage-cleaning service. We initially started it with our own money and time (my partner went from house to house teaching people to segregate and pick up their non-degradable garbage once a week), but soon many in the community started to contribute. We then engaged labour to clean the roads.

Residents from other neighbourhoods, envious of our plastic-free existence, have often talked about replicating the idea but cried off once they realised the perseverance and funding required in sustaining such an effort. But for us, the perseverance has truly paid off. Not in any overt social recognition kind of way, but in a way of insidious influencing of those around us.

Initially, when we went from house to house to collect waste, which the householders would clean and collect, many domestic helps would be apologetic if it was a small packet. They probably thought we were, in this guise of altruism, looking to get rich by selling their trash. But now they have understood the philosophy and proudly hand over their weekly packet, even if it's a small bundle.

Almost all the shops we visit for groceries, know about our no-plastic-bags drive. Any new shop hand gets admonished if he puts anything we have purchased in plastic bags. Then, our gardener told us he was going on a picnic with friends but said that the food will be served on shaal leaves because he doesn't believe in spoiling the environment.

But our best reward came when a friend invited us for lunch on Viswakarma puja at his factory - Viswakarma, the god of tools, is worshipped in all factories in Bengal. This invitation meant we would be part of a crowd of over 300 workers. Before I could respond, he said: "Don't worry, we will ensure the khichri is served on shaal leaves for you". He thought I was hesitant knowing that large-scale festivities meant a surfeit of thermocol.

We went for the lunch and were glad to be served on leaf plates. Our friend, however, apologised for the plastic glasses, but since the family has a business of injection-moulded products they were only using what they manufactured. He thought we would overlook this practical compromise, and we did. As we looked around we saw that everyone else was being served on shaal leaves too!