Roti, Kapda, Makaan aur Kachra

The popular stance in the development discourse is that consumption powers economy. To me, it is immensely baffling. Professionally, I thrive on identifying societal or individual problems (harmful behaviours to self or others) and designing participatory interventions to improve that and I see that this development paradigm related to consumption is riddled with issues. 

Domestic consumption in India in the last decade increased 3.5 times from ?31 trillion to ?110 trillion, says a BCG report. Consumers in Asia’s third largest economy increased their spends on financial services products, apparel, footwear, health, jewellery, and personal care in the last decade. The rural segment is growing at double the pace compared to their urban counterpart. The data implies that we care about how we look and how we are seen more than before, and collectively with the passage of time, it has become a social norm. 

There’s an expectation in our society that we will grow up, get a job and buy a house, and that house becomes the barometer of our success. Then we go to great lengths to decorate our houses to help distinguish ourselves. Susan Clayton, an environmental psychologist at the College of Wooster, says that for many people, their home is part of their self-definition, which is why we do things like decorate our houses and take care of our lawns. These large patches of vegetation serve little real purpose, but they are part of a public face people put on, displaying their home as an extension of themselves. 

Brands and new products thrive on this need, selling and pushing through into our lives, manipulating our value systems and social norms to buy more - the mahogany finish bookcase at your doorstep with free assembling service, award winning books to fill them with, porcelain owl to sit pretty on the accent cabinet, cotton silk curtains with a sheen for Diwali, the beautifully hand-embroidered organic cotton cushions to go with it. I’d stop at the living room for now. Through the year, we keep filling up our homes, cupboards, refrigerators and so on with more, replacing new things with newer ones, often priding ourselves in great sense of design and style or health conscious decisions.

We are well-informed, well-paid, well-connected and privileged with choices. Yet do we think enough about why we buy what we buy and where does it actually go - all of it? Not just the new pair of trousers we buy online but the one that it replaced in the cupboard (assuming it did), the multiple polyethylene bags it arrived in, the brown packing case with the sticky tape, the tags that we snip off and so on. Of course, to the bins, handed over to the garbage collection agency and then through a segregation site, ultimately to the landfill. 

Data from 2017 says that Mumbai and Delhi generate around 9,000 metric tonnes and 8,300 metric tonnes of waste per day respectively and nearly 75% of municipal garbage in India is dumped without processing. If we do the numbers right, each household adds 700-800kg of waste to the dump every year. Translates to about 1500 iPads every year. You and I.

Next time you drive past a smouldering landfill emitting methane, do not look horrified or cover your nose or look away. The flaming hell, the mountains of trash that compete in height with Taj Mahal are our very own, built on the choices we have the privilege to make.

We are consumed by consuming more, where less is no longer more.