5/ 100 Crisp Packet Dog

Litter. Trash. Rubbish. Waste. कूड़ा. Whatever you want to call it, it is absolutely everywhere in India. There are often breathtaking quantities of it piled up in corners where the gentle winds had created the beginnings of a rubbish pile, only for humans to decide they may as well add to it on a daily basis. If you peer over the wall behind a chai stall you’ll find a metre-deep pile of all the used cups and biscuit wrappers.

There used to be a large skip by the side of the road for litter, right next to our villa in Jaipur. When we stayed here in 2018 , in what is a fairly affluent area, our hosts were very proud of the fact that they had managed to convince other residents to actually place their rubbish in this new bin whereupon it would be emptied each morning. The street was quite clean and you no longer walked on a carpet of wrappers and paper cups.

We revisited in 2019 and things were already going badly. Although people were still using the big bin, through the night ragpickers would rifle amongst the conveniently arranged rubbish looking for anything they could reuse or recycle. It might sound like an ideal scenario — people recycling whilst also making a small living as a result — however they would empty the bins onto the street to find what they were looking for.

Our host Amita told us that the residents quickly lost interest in the bin when they could no longer see the value of it. They returned to the old way of simply tipping their rubbish into piles on the edges of the road throughout the day so that anything that remained until dawn the next morning would be collected by the rubbish truck.

The two dogs in today’s photograph had claimed this particular plastic covered patch as their own and were there outside our apartment, in this exact configuration, every one of the six days we spent in Jaipur. Like the tides, the litter pile would grow throughout the day and night and the dogs rose and fell with it, adjusting the little depressions they slept in as they went.