Sunday 16 November 2008

When lulling in and out of train-sleep, every glimpse out of the window is like the new article in National Geographic. On pulling into a station, awake and you might see the cut paper doll silhouettes of women carrying as-yet empty shopping bags, waiting for the early morning train. Open your eyes an hour later and you will see wide open landscapes that are not unlike the bracken-filled copses outside any British Rail window. As the train wallah prods your breakfast through the curtain, look out to the edge of a slum, bricks painted with bright advertisements in Hindi, children running towards the railroad tracks as young boys sit on the littered mounds and look on.

Though all regions blur into one, mobile phone text messages give a rough global positioning. “Welcome to Airtel M. Pradesh. For India-England live one-day cricket scores, did *646*605#.” “Welcome to Airtel Goa/Maharastra. Calls cost 1rs/min STD” “Welcome to Airtel Tamil Nadu.”

India is an enormous landmass. It’s easy to forget this, spending time in a city where people clamber over each other like mice in a bucket. When told there are 1.2 billion people in a country, you sometimes imagine that there is no space at all. And then you realise that India is no Luxembourg, covering some 1,269,210 square miles.

It’s also difficult to believe that there are stretches of Indian land not covered in a smattering of garbage. And yet it is one of the most enviromentally-aware cultures I have lived in. Tips on how to be greener fill the newspapers, and warnings of the current and future natural disasters are everywhere. Perhaps this is because the effects of pollution are tangible here: floods in Bihar, failed crops across the country, early snowfall in Kashmir. For the last couple of days a permanent smog has hung over Delhi, more intense than even the usual. The Times of India reported yesterday that it was part of a huge brown cloud hanging over South Asia, blocking the atmosphere. They even had a fairly terrifying graphic to illustrate it.

Recycling programmes are in effect across the country. People are paid to keep piles of old newspapers; they are bought back and collected by the government for a good proportion of their original street price. This scheme is so effective that news publishers have had to carefully track vendors to avoid them selling their papers to recycling wallahs rather than readers. There are other schemes in place, even in the most remote villages. One consists of swapping old clothes for kitchen utensils. Autorickshaws and public buses run on compressed natural gas, and there are plans to make these vehicles solar-powered. At stoplights, huge government signs encourage motorists to turn off their engines. One of the country’s first Critical Mass events was held in Delhi last week, and though the turn out was hardly significant enough to truly earn its moniker, there are increasing numbers of bicycles on the roads.

Compare this attitude to the US, for example, where at least 31,000 scientists still deny that global warming exists. In New York, for example, recycling schemes are fairly primitive compared to other big cities such as London. You have to make something of a scene to prevent being given even a cup of coffee in a takeaway bag. Only until last year was it made illegal for stores to keep their doors open with their air conditioning on full blast, enticing summer customers in from the heat. The New York Times rarely publishes environmental features. Despite this, Western governments are quick to point the un-green finger at rapidly industrialising countries, especially China and India. London is trying, but it is not that much better. India is blamed for its poor infrastructure, but it has been more proactive in evangelising the green message than most African countries.

Of course India is not perfect; and it’s often difficult to understand the ethical rationale behind preaching the recycling message to a people without access to basic santitation. But India is a country that experiences the destruction of global warming firsthand. While people in Devon suffer flood damage to family airlooms and row dinghies to the local post office, families in Bihar die in their thousands for lack of food aid. It’s no wonder that the latter are more willing to accept the global warming problem, and begin to think of solutions.