The challenge but also massive opportunity to inducing sustainability and environmental conservation in rural India

As you can read in “Taking out the trash” on the ‘Conserve Natural India’ blogspot of EduCARE India inducing environmentally respectful and conscious systems and behaviour, including solid waste management which is my area of work is an enormous challenge throughout India.  The environment, unfortunately, due to a multifaceted web of complex, yet often interrelated factors is still a much neglected issue as you can see below ...

Unfortunately, where I am based in, all sorts of animals eat from the waste container in Naddi:

Horses                                                                                And “Holy Cows”        

                  

However, things are slowly changing for the better. As I was able to experience on “World Environment Day” in Dharamshala, particularly for the younger generation, the environment is gaining recognition and importance. This was evidenced in both the number of schools(and pupils) as well as in the number of local leaders, politicians and environmental activists that attended the event aimed at highlighting environmental issues  and raising awareness of these. Many students, some as young as 8 or 9 years, held extremely impressive speeches on why the environment should be protected. In addition, almost all students convincingly held up posters, in Hindi and English, for hours.

One of the youngest speakers from a local school:                                                                              

      

Professor from the local university:

 

Advocating the importance of the environment through singing and celebrations:

   

Schoolgirls holding posters, some waiting to give a speech:

Displaying the many posters made:

 

Furthermore, even for the older population respecting the environment seems to become a more significant concern. The local public and private stakeholders that attended, including politicians, (particularly from Tibet’s exile government near Dharamshala) university lecturers as well as environmental activists showed equal willpower and dedication to the cause. Of course, conducting such an event is not a panacea, since actions need to follow words and only a very small subset of the population living in the city attended, but perhaps the participants, whether schoolchild or local politician will pass on this information to their family and friends and thus trigger positive change among more people. Even some of the schoolchildren living in Naddi and Shenny attended(falling under the “jurisdiction” of the EduCARE VIKAAS Centre in Naddi) which also means that environmental awareness will grow in small subsets of the population in Naddi which has great potential to trigger community development, also at the rural level the EduCARE Centres operate in. The boy in the picture, for example, who attended the Environment Day event lives in Naddi and was part of my host family and several other EduCARE India interns before me. Thus, the event changes minds even outside the boundaries of cities, including at the rural community level, such as in Naddi.

Bobby- the boy from the village who attended and sang a song at World Environment Day with fellow pupils:

Besides this event concerning ‘World Environment Day’ the first month of my solid waste management project has involved primarily online preparatory research of waste management systems and practices in India, on a national, state(Himachal Pradesh) as well as local basis(in my case the local municipal council “Gram Panchayat” in Naddi, ). I, for example, found out that the national government and particularly the state government of Himachal Pradesh are working hard to implement waste management measures but that, at least until now, these efforts have not reached the local, community level, probably mostly due to lack of local governmental will as well as neglect, lack of knowledge and lack of education towards the issue by the community. Unsurprisingly, doing research on waste management systems in other countries was also part of my research on solid waste. In addition, following the suggestions of the report of the state government of Himachal Pradesh(the state in which the VIKAAS centre in Naddi operates) I designed a survey studying waste management behaviours among all stakeholders in the community in order to assess local waste management needs, including those of households, hotels, restaurants, grocery shops, service providers (such as the laundry facility or the hairdresser) And of course talking to locals, fellow interns and observing personally helped to understand the situation better and further contributed to improve the survey. I will be starting its implementation next week.

I am thrilled to see how my project on this environmental issue will develop, but despite many obstacles(the REAL obstacles are probably still to come) I am confident of setting up an inclusive and complete sustainable solid waste management system in Naddi. This is dependent on many stakeholders, most importantly the local government and the community. However, involving them comprehensively, and convincing them of the need for participation, is mostly up to me. That is why I think I will succeed in implementing a sound, sustainable waste management system here. The coming months will tell…!