A couple took their little boy to play in the sand at the sea-wall beach. It took them half an hour to find a clean spot, free of refuse, polythene bags, empty chip packets and discarded foodstuff. Hardly had the child dug five inches of sand to make a castle more refuse began to emerge. Any place of recreation, be it the beaches, stadium, playground or the wide greenbelts between roads where people, mostly men, sit to talk, buy eatables from the pushcarts are just as filthy. The market place, lanes, gutters, open plots are littered with rubbish. You will find filth everywhere but in the skips, those concrete bins for rubbish. There will be a lot around a skip but very little inside.
I find the skip especially disturbing as an example of people's attitude. Someone brings bags of rubbish to throw in the skip but simply chucks the garbage in the general direction of the rubbish bin. Everything spills out of the bag onto the road near by. Now if an effort has been made to go to the rubbish bin why cannot the person make that little more effort to ensure the rubbish ends inside. Office boys and housemaids are the biggest culprits. On the other hand the office staff and housewife know servants are careless but do they ever scold or warn their service providers, or do they think their servants are not at fault? I know from personal experience even if I tell servants to throw the garbage inside the skip it may still not end inside. I spy on my maid who always swears she throws the garbage inside the skip. I can see the rubbish bin from the balcony of my apartment. I have seen her look towards the balcony and if she cannot see me she just chucks the rubbish near the bin. She gets a scold the next day. What I am trying to say is that it seems throwing rubbish inside the bin is not considered important.
Office boys and housemaids are merely notorious, but fact is everyone of us is guilty of polluting this city. From the over-sophisticated city dweller, to the aware middle-class, to the grimy labourer and last but not worse the beggar brigade are united in making a mess in this city. We throw empty juice tetrapacks, empty disposable plastic water and juice bottles (disposable in Karachi means to throw rubbish anywhere) half-eaten biryani, these waste things are just the tip of the rubbish mountain this city generates.
We complain that the municipal authority does nothing to clean the rubbish heaps; but do we ever ask ourselves who created the rubbish. Improper disposal of household refuse and used cartons and bottles in parks and playgrounds is the responsibility of each citizen. But clean public space will never happen because we do not have a sense of civic responsibility. Karachi is supposed to be a modern city, which means it should be civilised, and the first expression of civilised behaviour is that you do your bit to keep the city clean.
Question is; can you stop people from polluting the city? Answer: not in this city. From DHA and Clifton to Machar Colony the filth and flying shoppers and waste paper make this city look like the whole city is slums.
There are times when the mess goes from bad to worse, such as during the Eid sacrifice of animals, such as at a protest sit-in such as at a festival or mela. Look at the place after the event is over and you will see how shockingly messy the area has become.
Managing the refuse generated by more than 200 million people is no joke because we don't think city cleanliness is the responsibility of every citizen. Awareness campaigns, like Clean-City Day, when school children and adults go about collecting refuse, or TV channel telecast of disgusting effluent, choked gutters are just a vaneer of concern. The event-day passes, the few minutes of TV documentary ends and life is back to what it is; people are back to throwing refuse on the streets, lanes, gutters, parks and beaches, everywhere and anywhere.
Proper sanitation is the key to healthy life style and this is not just up to the sanitation workers to provide. Grandmothers used to say you can tell the cultural status of a household by the state of the street outside the residence. In the light of this yardstick the filthy lane in the commercial area where I live means we have no culture despite the fact every single household in the lane belongs to educated people of the middle-class.
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