Staunch free-traders may complain that India has too many restrictions on capital flows, but India has a thriving market society and I am consistently amazed at how differently things are bought and sold here. You can buy as little or as much of anything as you want and everything always seems up for negotiation. Need a phone charger? In Amritsar, a shopkeeper didn’t have loose chargers for sale, but was happy to take a charger out of one of the new phone box sets and just sell the charger. You can also buy a single cigarette, part of a pumpkin, or milk in whatever quantity you want. The idea of buying several quarts of berries at produce junction and throwing away the rest because they are so cheap doesn’t exist here. I am constantly amazed at what products find a new life here.
Yesterday, my roommate and I went to pick up our new kurtas (the long shirts) and the store keeper put them in a bag that felt a bit soft and stretchy on the outside, almost soft. I thought it seemed like a diaper. It wasn’t until we got home and I looked closer and realized that it was part of the diaper packaging remade into a bag and had “luvs” written all over it. The same goes for food. When I buy momos (Tibetan dumplings) on the street, the vendor usually packs them in bags made out of left-over packaging. Today, the bag was made out of an old “Halls” cough drop package; another day, out of a candy bar bag. The bags look like they have been cleaned and then pressed or glued together in some way to form a pouch.
However, India doesn’t have curb-side recycling in blue bins the way we do in the U.S. I haven’t figured out exactly what happen to the things we put in our trash can and then outside the house, but I’m fairly certain that somewhere along the way, someone goes through it to see if there is anything that can be salvaged. It’s not a glamarous job…it’s degrading, tough, and probably done mostly by out-castes, but it is effective. “Higher value” trash is dealt with differently.
Last week, after my birthday party, I came into our dining room to find all the old beer bottles lined up on the floor, our recently replaced kitchen faucet being weighed, old newpapers piled up and my roommate arguing with a man about how much he was going to pay us to take away our old bottles, newspapers, and metal. Wait — we got money for our trash and recyclables? Yes. The guy buying was a kabariwalla and if you walk outside any residential colony in the morning, you’ll see men riding around on bikes and yelling/garbling “KABARIWALLA!” to let the households know that they want to buy your trash. Like the take-away food bags, they have some process where they clean and re-sell the recyclables. Amazing.
Oh, and by the way, traffic violation tickets, sold out train tickets, used books, and all sorts of other things are also usually negotiable.
I haven’t been to the physical exhibit, but there is an interesting photo exhibit on waste here if you click on the link, then “Projects” –> “Tracing Waste.”
