Talking rubbish

They arrived without any fanfare and would no doubt be surprised to find themselves featuring in a national newspaper were they to be sentient; but no matter — Bahawalpur has a bunch of bright new rubbish bins. They appeared all over the city, a yellow-orangey colour and a little smaller than the standard issue rubbish bins seen everywhere, and they were immediately put to use. Give people conveniently placed waste disposal that is regularly emptied and they will use it. Period.

The rubbish bins are just the latest civic innovation, and follow on the heels of the blue and white street signs that popped up a few months ago, and the well tended plants and flowers that adorn the dividers in the middle of the road.

Somebody somewhere in the depths of the organisation that runs Bahawalpur has taken a set of decisions that led to all this civic improvement, and then gone ahead and spent the money that makes it happen. It is from such bureaucratic actions that comes something very hard to define — civic pride. Persuading close to a million people that it really is in the best interests of everybody to keep the city clean is no easy task, and for a country that is to say the least lackadaisical in its litter disposal and waste-management, almost revolutionary.

Coming from a country where there are hefty fines for throwing your rubbish anywhere other than the appropriate receptacle (… which are enforced, make no mistake), my first visit to the subcontinent over 40 years ago was a bit of a shock, rubbish-wise. The shock wore off long ago but I am hard-wired to be actually offended by willfully negligent littering, and have been known to go and pick up a discarded pizza-box and hand it back to the person who made the mistake of littering under my very nose. So I take a close interest in litter-levels in my travels across the country and it is a very variable picture, Dear Reader.

For many years Multan was the place that triggered the most violent response from my personal Filth-o-metre, closely followed and occasionally exceeded by Jhang. Large parts of Karachi are little more than middens. I once observed a dead beggar lying close to the Salvation Army church in Karachi, next to the place where I bought my daily newspapers. The body was there for eight hours before an Edhi vehicle came to remove it. A human as rubbish.

You may chide me for being partisan by singing praise for my home city of Bahawalpur, but be assured that if it deserved condemnation I would be singing no less loudly — though a different song. It really is just about the cleanest and best-kept city I know in the country, and that includes Islamabad which most people who have been there see as the benchmark for civic cleanliness. This is not a recent development; it was a damn sight cleaner than just about everywhere else I had visited when I first got here over 20 years ago, so cleanliness was in the civic genes long before I was casting a critical eye over the place.

Why bother to spend 700 words banging on about rubbish bins? Because it really does matter. It really does. There is nothing that special about Bahawalpur, a small city a very long way from just about everywhere — but if Bahawalpur can keep its face regularly washed and wear shiny shoes then there is no reason why other places cannot do the same. Except that perhaps there is… a little thing called ‘mindset’. You have to actually want to put rubbish in the basket, to keep that sweet wrapper in your pocket until you pass a litter bin and not throw that plastic water bottle by the side of the road but — and here’s a thought — put it for recycling!

Pakistan ought to be a recycling paradise, and I have heard though not yet had it confirmed that Bahawalpur is mulling setting up a recycling centre. A couple of weeks back I saw a silver electric rickshaw. Just outside the city is the largest solar power generation project in the country. Oh… and those smart rubbish bins. Tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th,  2015.

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