Delhi is throwing a party. In autumn 2010 the city will play host to the Commonwealth Games, a sort of mini-Olympics for the United Kingdom, its overseas territories, and all of the postcolonial states that share the dubious distinction of having once been under the Queen’s proper fist. From badminton to boxing, pistol shooting to ping pong, in exactly 425 days Delhi will be abuzz with athletes, coaches, camera crews and fans.

John Steffensen kicks it at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Australia

John Steffensen kicks it at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Australia

In order to make sure that everyone has a grand time at this fête, the city has elected to enact violence, both physical and aesthetic, on some of its poorest citizens. First, the ironically-named “Social Welfare Department” has created a dozen anti-beggar squads that fly around the city in vans and drag beggars out of intersections and streets where they eke out a livelihood. Second, the government has begun looking into the possibility of planting huge walls of bamboo trees along major thoroughfares in order to “screen the slums and garbage along the roads that will be frequented by visitors and athletes taking part in the games.”

Bamboo(zled)

Bamboo(zled)

Developments such as these are not new, of course. Gearing up for the Beijing Olympics last year, the Chinese government kicked legions of migrant workers, beggars, masseuses and fortune-tellers out of the capital and instituted a $7.00 fine on public spitting. But Delhi’s recent pronouncements got me thinking about parties in general, about our “social faces,” and, of course, about the wastepickers.

I’ll admit that when I throw a party I generally go overboard, fretting like Mrs. Dalloway for hours before guests arrive. My tendencies are common: procure some freshly cut flowers; shove aside the beloved-but-worn footstool to facilitate freedom of movement; stow the breakables; remove any photographs or items that seem too personal; clean maniacally; and so on.  From the host’s perspective, parties almost universally include the transformation of space. On a metaphorical plane, this transformation demands a denial of the human body, a denial that the party venue is actually a lived-in place.

It’s no different for cities.  But the problem is that the civic body is unlike the body of a single human party host. The civic body is a multiplicity; it is coherent because of, not in spite of, its diversity.  Denying an integral part of the civic body by hiding it behind bamboo is like me walking around my party with my head in a burlap bag.

Wastepickers at an area meeting in Seemapuri. What's to hide?

Wastepickers at an area meeting in Seemapuri. What's to hide?

I am particularly incensed that the brains behind Operation Bamboo is Shashi Tharoor.  Mr. Tharoor is the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and a member of the Indian Parliament from Kerala. He’s also the proverbial “distinguished alumnus” from my graduate school.  He had a long career in the UN, rising to the rank of Under-Secretary General and narrowly losing the race for Secretary General when Kofi Annan retired. According to everybody’s favorite open source encyclopedia, he’s a “prolific author, columnist, journalist, human-rights advocate, and humanitarian.” It’s deeply embarrassing to me and my Fletcher School colleagues that this humanitarian and human-rights advocate from Fletcher is so ashamed of his own civic family that he proposes to lock them in the closet when his party guests arrive.

On the face of it, bamboo is a good idea. Delhi already ranks high in tree cover, and additional greenery would provide shade and suck carbon out of the atmosphere. But deployed as a purely cosmetic measure, the bamboo screens entirely miss the point of “going green.” In fact, some of the very communities who will be hidden are Delhi’s greenest citizens. My climate change research this summer has revealed that wastepickers’ annual greenhouse gas reductions from recycling are equivalent to taking 31,000 passenger vehicles off the roads each year. What’s more, they undertake door-to-door waste collection, composting, and form the backbone of Delhi’s waste management and recycling systems. They are greener than the bamboo that will shield them from public gaze.

Wastepickers organizing in Seemapuri

Wastepickers organizing in Seemapuri

The Commonwealth Games have spurred the development of tons of new infrastructure: a slick new subway system, dozens of overpasses and bridges, and widened roads. These are capital intensive, long-term investments. To truly address the “unsightly” slums and garbage, a similar investment is needed in the city’s social infrastructure. This investment is partly about money, but it’s mostly about dignity; hiding poverty from the guests further stigmatizes and penalizes the poor. Without an investment in social infrastructure, Mr. Tharoor & Company may wake up after the Games looking around the living room at some new sprigs of bamboo, but they’ll be nursing the same old raging hangover.

As my research on climate and wastepickers progresses, I’ve been working with Chintan to identify several areas in Delhi that might serve as case studies of local recycling efforts and their relationship to emissions reductions. The volume and composition of waste recycled by wastepickers in a specific geographical area is probably the most crucial bit of information in any attempt to account for their climate change mitigation work, so we’ve decided to begin in the areas with the best waste data. Last week, AP Peace Fellow Jacqui Kotyk and I visited one such area, Chintan’s micro-recycling center on the outskirts of the city. Check out the video below:

In the last week I discovered how wastepickers in Delhi are unwittingly converting my breakfast into lucrative carbon credits without receiving a cent of the profits.

Every morning before heading off to the Chintan office I eat a bowl of cornflakes with a banana. It’s both the minor indulgence of a Midwestern American guy living abroad and a method of giving my stomach one break per day from the spicy and voluminous curries, dals, and masala dishes that otherwise constitute my meals.

"The Usual"

"The Usual"

Several days ago I looked up from the little archipelago of flakes floating in my milk to the cereal box and banana peel, curious about their fate.  Like most kitchen waste in Delhi, they’ll be tossed in the trashcan together. I try to separate the recyclables from the organics, but I suspect that once they leave the kitchen they are all mixed up anyway.

Since this is a common “service apartment,” there is a gentleman named Radu who lives with the landlord downstairs and swings by occasionally to clean and empty the trash. I’m always curious where the heck it goes. There is no curbside pickup; I see no large dustbins anywhere on the block; and unlike my first apartment in Delhi, here there is no independent door-to-door wastepicker who rings the bell each day to collect the waste.

In situations like this, the family helpers often take the garbage directly to the neighborhood “dhalao,” or disposal unit. So today I marched over to the dhalao nearby, where I met a group of wastepickers meticulously segregating the incoming trash into organics, which they can’t use, and recyclables, which they can. It is here where my banana peel and cereal box part ways.

The Dhalao

The dhalao in my neighborhood. The dump bin in the foreground is full of waste that the wastepickers can't recycle. Behind the bin inside the structure I met a half dozen men segregating waste.

The brunt of waste in dhalaos comes directly from private residences, and the rest arrives on the rickshaws and backs of the wastepickers themselves. Dhalaos provide small but crucial space for segregation in an otherwise incomprehensibly dense city. City trucks then collect what remains after the wastepickers have finished sorting at the dhalaos and transport it to the city dumps.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

Here’s where it gets crazy. Such thoroughly sorted waste is perfect for composting.  And as I wrote last week, composting is one method of keeping wet waste out of landfills where it would otherwise decompose under anaerobic conditions, releasing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. So the two government entities in the area, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) have teamed up with a private firm to create a composting unit to earn greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits.

I visited this composting unit, in Okhla, and spoke with the manager.  The 200 tons of pre-segregated organic waste that arrives each day is delivered for free by the NDMC and MCD. It comes mostly from dhalaos, and because the waste has been pre-sorted by the wastepickers, there are huge savings for the composting unit and city. In fact, the manager was surprisingly deferential and spoke of the necessity of the wastepickers in his business model. After seven weeks of windrow composting, my banana peel becomes organic fertilizer, which is then sold to a wholesale fertilizer company for profit.  The wastepickers, at present, see none of the proceeds.

Bags of organic fertilizer ready to be sold from the Okhla composting unit.

Bags of organic fertilizer, the final product of the Okhla composting plant, ready to be trucked off and sold to a fertilizer wholesaler.

This project also has been approved for greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM is an offset scheme developed through the Kyoto Protocol whereby industrialized countries with emission-reduction commitments can finance and implement emission-reducing projects in developing countries in order to help meet their own Kyoto targets.

The Okhla composting plant is slated to receive emissions reduction credits amounting to 234,231 metric tones of CO2 equivalent over a seven-year period. At current carbon prices this amounts to roughly 3.5 million dollars. Who knows what the firm’s initial investment in the composting unit was, but it’s clear that the land was free, the waste is delivered for free, and the hard work of the wastepickers effectively subsidizes the composting unit. Composting is a great thing for the climate, but if those who are responsible for its benefits are shut out of the process, social justice is jettisoned for green profit.

In pursuit of even more CDM credits and some electricity, the city now has plans to site a waste-to-energy plant next door. Since waste-to-energy plants often burn dry, combustible waste to heat their boilers and turn their turbines, they are in direct competition with the wastepickers for the city’s recyclable waste content. They also have poor track records in developing countries and many times have worse energy and emissions balances than traditional recycling of the sort that wastepickers undertake. It’s a shame that in pursuit of ostensibly “clean” energy, the livelihoods of some India’s hardest working urban poor are jeopardized.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

The good news is that wastepickers and NGOs who support them are beginning to organize around these issues.  At the recent climate talks in Bonn, a coalition of wastepickers from around the world held a roundtable discussion and press conference to a packed audience in order to address unsustainable CDM projects that affect their work. Chintan is among this dynamic global network of activists who are pressing hard for more inclusive, rational, and sustainable policies on waste and climate.