Revive the old tradition and plan for garbage logistics to treat Arunachal’s waste problem

I began my fieldwork in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, in 2019. At first, I stayed in a guesthouse by the roadside, where tourists and drivers pass through the small place in the mountains at night. I ate at the highway roadside restaurants every day and survived on instant coffee, milk and crackers I could find in the small shops. It is imaginable that I created lots of garbage every day. From the napkins, containers, wraps of food and packages of toiletries to batteries, torn socks and used papers, the garbage I made was difficult to deal with in the area. I came from a place where recycling and downsizing plastics are the basic ideas to work out waste. The government garbage trucks only come once a week or longer, while the quantity of increasing waste has become more and more serious with the popularity of tourism.

In 2020, I shifted to a homestay and began to live with a big family. I noticed that they collected all usable materials in their allotment. These included old tyres, plastic bags, bamboo sticks, weathered plywood, rusty metal, etc. Regardless of the negative effect caused by burning and melting some of the materials, they melted plastic bags to glue and strengthen farm tools, durable rubber and wood for small patching work of the house. The idea of recycling has been with the locals before the so-to-speak rural modernisation movement. Take the toilet, for example, the local people built elevated plank toilets, keeping the excrement and urine dry naturally under the floor. The accumulated human waste becomes natural fertiliser after the cold winter. Similar ideology has been applied in many parts of their lives, their style of utilising accessible resources efficiently reduced the volume of waste that cannot be treated and has to be burned.

River and soil pollution is an increasingly serious issue in Arunachal Pradesh. As I have witnessed in the countryside, when the households are forbidden to burn the garbage and also lack a spare ground to keep the garbage (labelled as dirty and should be kept outside the house), they sneakily dispose of them at places that are out of the usual sight — mostly slopes by a roadside or near the riverbank. What reflects such a phenomenon, besides the lack of good inclusive governance, is the hesitation in treating new kinds of materials in the countryside daily life. Many small communities in the mountains, used to produce what they need, from clothing to paper. Therefore, they held a clear view of assembling and reassembling elements of making or calling it recycling in our modern, urban-based tone. The transition to ‘modern life,’ which is filled with imported goods from cities and lowlands, struck the ecological genealogy and perhaps they need to be guided on how to opt for the numerous invading, everlasting materials, way more urgent than being seen as the new buyers of products.

Garbage near a homestead in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh. Photo: Iris Ruyu Lin

Clean and dirt, purity and contamination have cultural logic. Uniform intervention neglecting the existing cultural logic would only cause budget waste and more environmental problems. For example, as many mountain dwellers shift to cash-based labour work than managing different agricultural plots, they have become more dependent on the kitchen garden and market-supplied necessities. The building and arranging of the space for the flush toilet rarely consider such a changed way of life. Therefore, wastewater from the washing machine or basin from the concrete flush toilet has been directed to the nearest vegetable garden that sustains fresh food for the household, possibly causing more future health problems.

The mountain societies have the habit to use fire to transform the quality and characteristics of resources, swidden farming is one example. The above three examples illustrate the importance to consider the indigenous way of life, cultural orders and flexibility to induce behavioural change for greater health security of the riverine.

The above explanations highlight the waste management strategy needs to be relevant to the place and people’s common culture. One-size-fits-all approach carrying the modernisation mask could lead the development path away from total ecological security for the people and biodiversity. Moreover, the integral health of water-soil-people nexus impacts both environment and economic income sustainability for the tourism-popular mountainous region.

When I left the last village of my fieldwork and returned to the university to do the writing of my dissertation, my homestay aunt said to me, “I won’t sweep the house floor for three days.” It is generally believed that the visitors should be treated with kindness for surviving in the mountains is challenging. When visitors leave, they leave behind some parts of themselves (in terms of whichever forms) at the host’s residence and it is the host’s kind responsibility to keep those incomplete fragments for some time to keep the traveller safe. Three days is a symbolic period perceiving the visitor has reached their destination. Not a thing will go wasted, if the common sense of the mountain community can be preserved and facilitated with active institutions, I believe the pollution issue can be solved in Arunachal and other hilly areas at the foot of the Indian Himalayas.

Read more:

• An Arunachal Pradesh town has swapped its water pollution problem for air pollution
• Arunachal's pristine river Kameng turns into dumpyard

Iris Ruyu Lin works at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth

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