India Taking Responsibility

While it is far from alone in having a huge problem with single-use plastics, the country has made an eye-catching pledge to do something about it.

- Huw Kingston

IT TOOK ME QUITE A WHILE TO FIND IT. I’d searched the whole of our luxurious cabin at Reni Pani Jungle Lodge for what is usually so easy to find. Soap in bars, coffee in jars, filtered water in reusable aluminium bottles, bins lined with reusable canvas bags – someone was paying attention. Finally, in the bathroom, there it was: plastic wrap around a spare toilet roll.

We all know that something has to be done about our over-use of plastic, a material that is burying our lands and seas under a glistening blanket laid down to the drumroll of plastic bottles bouncing down the road in the wind. It’s no surprise ‘single-use’ was chosen as the 2018 word of the year by Collins Dictionary.

We’d just arrived at the lodge after a few days trekking and camping in Satpura National Park. During those days, I’d been happy to find little evidence of that most ubiquitous and problematic of materials in a country where it has been so hungrily adopted. Our guides even picked up plastic that they noticed had washed down the Denwa River into the park.

I was similarly impressed when, rafting on the Ganga near Rishikesh some weeks later, our safety kayakers regularly fished plastic bottles from the water.

“Twice a year the rafting companies spend a day cleaning up the river and its banks,” Akshay Kumar told me. Kumar was one of the first operators on the river back in the 1980s. He told me there were now over 300.

As the longest and most revered river in India, there is a government-led initiative, The National Mission for Clean Ganga.

“You wouldn’t believe what we collect,” said Gaurav Chopra of Cleantec Infra, a business contracted to dredge up the flotsam and jetsam of our plastic-infested lives from the Ganga and other Indian watercourses.