These images are screenshots from the 2010 documentary film, The Light Bulb Conspiracy.
I asked the post graduate students of Industrial Design after our class viewing what they thought of the film. Had it changed their attitude towards what and how they buy, use and design? What was the most striking thing they took away from the film?
One of the students answered that the desecration of the local landscape and people - because of discarded electronic waste shipped to Ghana from European countries under the guise of 'second hand goods' - was what had disturbed her the most. And that she would probably think twice now before buying and discarding industrially processed goods.
"But hadn't she ever noticed similar sights in India, and especially in the NCR?" How was it, I asked, that she hadn't been similarly disturbed by barelegged children rummaging in rubbish heaps and the mounting trash all around and in our cities and towns? She said she had noticed them but somehow the enormity of it hadn't registered in her mind.
Thinking about it later, I realised that the reason that she - and the others students in the class - had not linked the sight of children in trash with the malaise of a cycle of endless consumption of toxic goods, was because of the way we plan and build today.
Poor people, like the refuse of our urban life, are pushed away to the peripheries of our cities - and our imaginations. We see them in ones and twos or threes - not altogether. And so it is easy to ignore them. To not think about where they come from, how the live, why they are on the streets at all.
By segregating people and spaces based on different income-groups in economic and urban planning, we have created living hells. Pre-colonial cities - that we often vilify - seem far more humane in comparison.
The French traveller, Francois Bernier, describing the city of Shahjahanabad in the mid-17th century, writes about: ‘...the five streets apart from the two principal ones’, where are ‘dispersed the habitations of Mansebdars, rich merchants and others’... [i]ntermixed with these different houses is an immense number of small ones, built of mud and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common troopers, and all that vast multitude of servants and camp-followers’.
Its is clear that the well-off and the not so well-off live in close proximity in such a city - which makes it difficult to profess ignorance of the condition of the poor or relinquish responsibility for that condition. Not just that, but also the mode of economic production in the city of that time is decentralised and craft- based. Neither driven by planned or perceived obsolescence, nor requiring vast amounts of raw materials. And so such a city does not create the colossal waste or landscapes of degradation that characterise our economies today.
Bernier has his biases, which are evident in his observations. He avers that ‘there are no streets like ours of S.Denis', and '[t]hat which so much contributes to the beauty of European towns, the brilliant appearance of the shops, is wanting in Delhi'. He is disapproving of the shops here, where:
‘For one that makes a display of beautiful and fine cloths, silk and other stuffs striped with gold and silver, turbans embroidered with gold, and brocades, there are at least five and twenty where nothing is seen but pots of oil or piles of butter, piles of basket filled with rice, barley, chick-peas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Gentiles, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Mahometans, and a considerable portion of the military.’
In his disapproval of the main markets of Delhi where both necessities and luxuries find place, Bernier carries his own cultural references. We see that even before the entire world was cursed by the deliberate policy of planned and perceived obsolescence of industrial production, spatial and economic segregation was seen as a desirable practice in Europe.
We too now seem to have fallen hook, line and sinker for that line of thought. If the Ghazipur landfill site was in the midst of Delhi - next to the School of Planning and Architecture for instance or en route to the Parliament in the heart of New Delhi - would planners, bureaucrats or politicians, in their own interests, not be moved to do something to reduce it?
Unfortunately, as The Hindu reports, living near a landfill site has been normalised - even when it is recorded to be 236 feet tall and covers nearly 70 acres.
And so our planning policies continue to hide the connections between the waste generated by industrial economies. And perpetrated by heedless product design and urban design.
