Running Out of Breath—Page 3

Kanpur's power supply isn't the only part of the city's decaying, overburdened infrastructure that's failing. If anything, the city's water system is worse. Sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, the qazi of Kanpur, Manzoor Ahmad, who is the chief cleric of the city's large Muslim population, says: "The other day, a woman living just next door to this room bottled the water from her tap and sent it to the mayor. 'See if you can drink this,' she told the mayor. There was no response." Indeed, Kanpur's water is even more famously polluted than its air. By the 1980s, the discharge from tanneries and other industries had made the Ganges stinking and discolored, despite its importance as a holy river. Twenty years ago, the government of India launched an ambitious scheme to clean up the Ganges; Kanpur's tanneries were required to treat their effluent before dumping it into the river. Twenty years on, the river is still horribly polluted at Kanpur: the water smells, and locals who drink from the river often fall ill. The river water is treated before it gets to the taps of Kanpur's residents, yet an antiquated system of piping ensures that sewage and clean water flow side by side, separated sometimes only by inches. The inevitable often happens: the qazi reports that he recently heard of a case of sewage flowing out of a tap instead of water. He pauses, then says: "Sometimes, this city gets so dirty that it's not fit for humans to live in."

But once upon a time, it was. The Kotwali is Kanpur's most famous landmark. A British-era police office, it is a striking building, capped off by a tower with four clocks. The yellow paint is peeling, revealing the brick structure underneath, as if the building were afflicted with a painful dermatological condition; none of its four clocks are working, laundry is put out to dry on its balconies, and posters of politicians and stains of red betel juice disfigure its scabrous walls. The Kotwali is now a metaphor for a city that seems to have been skinned of civic decency: a place where piles of garbage sit on roadsides, where rubble from construction sites is simply tossed onto the roads, where residents fling their waste onto the pavements, unconcerned about one another. For the qazi, the rot in the city's administration goes all the way from the bottom—from municipal sweepers who sometimes refuse to do their work well unless they are bribed—to the top: "Look at where the mayor and the big officials of this city live—even those areas are so filthy." Yet the qazi, and optician Maqbool Hassan, like many older inhabitants, remember a time, 35 or 40 years ago, when the streets were swept twice a day and Kanpur was cleaner. Most old-timers trace Kanpur's civic collapse to a larger malaise: the rotting away of the political culture of Uttar Pradesh, which has acquired, over decades, a reputation for being one of India's most misgoverned states. Start a conversation with someone in Kanpur about pollution, of the literal kind, and it will eventually end up as a discussion about the abstract kinds of pollution eating away at the state: corruption, poor law and order, and tensions between various castes and classes. "Until we get politicians who are truly accountable to the people," says Hassan, "we won't see a cleanup in this city."

At night, Kanpur teems with activity. it is well past 10 p.m., but shopkeepers are still squatting in their stalls in the city's alleys, selling fried sweets, small pieces of gold jewelry, copper pots and Harry Potter T shirts. Then the morning comes, and it's time to clean up the garbage.

In Baconganj, a congested, mostly Muslim neighborhood, charcoal smoke blows from grimy restaurants into houses; a slick of sewage shines around doorsteps; children play hide-and-seek in piles of trash. "We've got every disease here, because of the filth," complains one resident, a tailor. "Sometimes men just go crazy from living in places like this." There is a rattling noise behind him and he steps aside; two boys come pushing a wheelbarrow brimming with iridescent black muck, which they have scooped out of a gutter; they will take it out of the alley and dump it on the main road. If the residents of that road are lucky, it may get collected from there and dumped somewhere else. If those residents are lucky, it will get picked up by a city truck and driven 15 km away to be dumped beside a busy road, at a place where miles of open country are polluted with Kanpur's refuse. Cows graze through the garbage there, red-eyed mynas hop about, and a family of scavengers looks for polythene bags. "This has been a good year for us," says the paterfamilias. "There have been very few cases of diarrhea, compared to last year." Done collecting, he ties the polythene bags together and drops them on a giant scale to weigh them; merchants come all the way from New Delhi and Benares to buy the bags, which he sells at nine cents per kilogram.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next

	Learning to Fly Green [Sep. 25, 2006] Air travel can be an environmentally dirty business. A couple tips on making it cleaner Dangerous Dive [Jul. 10, 2006] The perils and politics of swimming in China's Pearl River Still Losing a Harbor [Jun. 19, 2006] Hong Kong has a rare opportunity to fix its unwelcoming waterfront. Think it will take it? China's Toxic Shock [Nov. 27, 2005] A huge chemical spill shuts down a city's water--and another clumsy official cover-up is exposed The Middle Landfill [Nov. 17, 2003] China's economy vs. its environment More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine