Jodie Underhill, India's British garbage lady

Jodie Underhill is waging what many believe is a losing battle against garbage in India

It was December 2008. Even for a seasoned traveller like Jodie Underhill, 41, India was a shock. It wasn’t the crowds; it wasn’t the traffic, cars and honking; it wasn’t the glare of men; it wasn’t the chaos you encounter when you step out on streets; it wasn’t the smells that accost you. 

It was the garbage that she couldn’t help but notice everywhere. After a while, Underhill felt she couldn’t shake off the garbage; it was following her everywhere she went.

Underhill had come to India to hold a workshop in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, for children to learn to write letters (she had been sponsoring the education of two children who wrote letters to her and she felt she could help them and other children improve their letter writing skills). Since it was her first visit to India, Underhill decided to come three months earlier and travel around the country before reaching Dharamshala in March 2009. 

She landed in Mumbai, went on a bus to Pune, on to Goa and then to Gokarna, Mysore, Coimbatore, Cochin, Ooty, Kodaikanal, Kerala, Kanyakumari, Bangalore, Auroville and Delhi. A hardy shoe-string budget traveller from the age of 17, Underhill had been to dozens of countries across continents by the time she was 30. “It wasn’t as if I was some high-end tourist staying at fancy resorts, ”she says. 

She had been to places where the poorest lived — Mexico, Latin American countries, South East Asia — and was accustomed to staying at the most modest possible accommodation.

Yet nowhere did she encounter what she did in India. “No matter where I went in India — a city, a small town, a village, a colony, a park, a forest, a lake, hillsides…I couldn’t shake off the garbage. India was the only country I had been to where I thought I’m going to have to leave,” says Underhill.

It wasn’t just the garbage; it was the overall level of sanitation or the lack of it. “Toilets, guesthouses, budget places to stay…I’d open the door of a public toilet and the stench and sight of overflowing sewage water would almost make me throw up. Cleanliness just didn’t seem to matter,” she adds. 

She has trained her body to use the toilet only twice a day — so deep runs her fear of what she may find in a public toilet. India was making her so unhappy that her friends and family in the UK urged her to return. 

Taking matters in her own hand

But India’s squalor had in some manner got under Underhill’s skin. It was in Dharamshala that Underhill decided she had to do something about it. She led a clean-up drive in Mcleodganj and realised she wasn’t the only person troubled by it. Almost a 100-150 others — mostly foreigners — joined the march and picked up trash through the town.

But the locals  were not willing to get involved. “Most Indians watched looking puzzled from a distance,” says Underhill. In general they seemed to say, “What on earth are you doing?” A hopelessness lurked in their quizzical looks that said you’ll clean up today but tomorrow it will be back to square one. But eventually a few — embarrassed more than convinced — relented and joined the clean up drive. They installed dustbins everywhere. Hotels in the area that were dumping their waste in the children’s playgrounds started a campaign to discourage this.

As I listen to Underhill, a gloom descends over me. Haven’t I had the same thought hundreds of times over the years ? Haven’t as many of us who can afford it given up train travel simply because we couldn’t deal with the toilets. Wasn’t I as much to blame as every Indian she encountered in McLeodganj?

She organised a second drive to clean up Triund in 2009, a heavenly spot reached by an uphill short trek from Mcleodganj overtaken by trash. It took a group of 30 people one year to clean the backlog of trash. 

The matter irked her enough to leave England, relocate to India, and that was the beginning of Waste Warriors — the organisation Underhill started in 2009. Waste Warriors today has 60 salaried employees and runs three projects — in Dharamshala, Corbett (this project is about to close down for lack of funds) and Dehradun. It survives primarily on donations from foundations and individuals. Several volunteers also work with the organisation.

After three years of living in Mcleodganj, in 2012, Underhill came to Dehradun (now the headquarters of Waste Warriors) and started a chapter there with support from the Max India foundation.

If the piles of trash irked Underhill, what bothered her even more was the way people accepted it. “If I say to a group of even highly educated Indians, your country is very dirty, they react with shock. They get annoyed, taking it as some kind of personal affront,” says Underhill. She says she finds people are so “desensitised” and so “immune” that large parts of the population can no longer see it. “What else explains their willingness to have meals next to piles of trash and flies or to enter a filthy toilet?” she asks.

She narrates one of her innumerable, bewildering incidents. Once she was travelling on a train and she asked another passenger where she could dispose of her garbage. He took it out of her hands and threw it out of the window before she could stop him.

Nowhere, however, is the attitude worse than with the Indian male bureaucrat. They are failing people, above all, in her view. A senior state bureaucrat in Uttarakhand told her young female colleague at a meeting that she should not waste her time on “all this since she would soon be married and rolling chapatis for her husband.” Underhill was outraged when the girl narrated the incident to her later.

Members of Waste Warriors segregate recyclable trash from other waste.

No funds for NGOs

Two years ago, impressed with their work, the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh met them and agreed to finance their work in the state. A public announcement was made. But as they soon discovered, signing the cheque doesn’t mean receiving the funds. Bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes informed them that they can’t give any money to NGOs. There is some kind of blanket ban.  

“So now there’s a situation where the urban local bodies don’t do their job, people don’t want to pay for waste collection and NGOs can’t be funded even if they are willing to do the work,” says Underhill.

The same is true for central funds. When she first heard of the Swacch Bharat mission, Underhill and her team celebrated. They felt their problems would finally be over. But no such luck. The mission funds are also not available for NGOs — regardless of what kind of work they may be doing. Underhill met a director of the mission in Delhi, who took little interest in what she had to say — watching a cricket match on the TV screen, playing behind her all through the discussion.

In Uttarkhand, at the municipal level, things are worse. Whatever little waste management does happen, it happens despite the bureaucracy, not because of them. “They don’t want to do anything to solve the problem and they definitely don’t want anyone else to tell them how to do it,” she says, adding that her being a foreigner doesn’t help matters. They dismiss her as a blip — one that can just be swatted away like a fly. For the last five years she has broken her head against a wall but the administration is unmoved.

Public parks — like Gandhi park — are managed in Dehradun by Waste Warriors (CII had funded it) as the municipal authorities don’t bother to even turn up. At the municipal level, there is no segregation of waste in the state; the segregation facility in Dehradun has been under construction for six years. Uttarakhand recently amended its solid waste management law but as with many problems in India, the law is not the issue; it’s the implementation and enforcement.

If the authorities are blind to the issue, individuals are not a lot better. “The hazards of not managing waste are not as imminent, so no one wants to put a value to it,” she argues.

Underhill says this is the attitude — be it the rich or poor. People with large houses would rather their maid threw the garbage into an empty plot nearby than pay for waste collection. Segregation — a concept they don’t yet fully comprehend — is considered too much trouble. 

The lack of funds, individual and official apathy aside, even personally India hasn’t proved easy for Underhill. In the beginning, credibility was a huge issue. Most people she went to for support argued that she would go back to her own country — as soon as the going got a little tough. Why was she taking this upon herself? People treated her with suspicion, trying to ascertain her motives.

If finances are a problem for the NGO, they are even more of a problem for her personally. Due to visa restrictions, Underhill cannot earn a salary here unless she makes the equivalent of $25,000 or above — which the NGO obviously can’t afford. So, she has been travelling back to the UK, earning some money and coming back to live here on her UK earnings. 

So where does that leave us? “People will get very sick. Water is polluted, air is polluted and now the soil is steadily getting polluted. So, a plague cannot be ruled out,” she says.