In old South Indian folklore, two travellers meet at the bank of a river. They scan the shore and water when one asks, “I’ve never crossed this river before. Have you? If the current is too strong, we could lose our shoes!”
And he takes off his shoes and walks barefoot into the river. The second traveler frowns in doubt.
“I’ve never crossed this river, either. If there are big-toothed fish, we could lose our feet!”
Then he walks into the river with his shoes on.
We meet these two travellers often. They tend to turn up every time you look for the ‘why’ of things.
According to reports, by 2050, Urban India’s waste is expected to rise to 436 million tons upwards. Out of many, we looked into two challenges that lie in reducing the waste in the city and the load on landfills. The first and key challenge is people’s resistance to segregation of wet and dry waste, leading to the generation of tons of non-recyclable garbage every day around metros.
The second is illegal ‘blind- spots’, or dimly lit areas all around the city that aren’t well maintained to begin with, where people dump their garbage when no one is looking. They make it impossible to process, recycle and compost waste efficiently. In fact, out of 95% of the waste in landfills, reports say that barely 4% is composted.
While looking at how garbage was discarded, we visited test wards in the municipality early in the morning.
The average morning, like many neighbourhoods across the country, came alive between 6 a.m. – 8 a.m, unless it was a rental that housed students, young singles or married immigrant couples. Between 6 a.m. – 8 a.m., the woman of the house appeared outside at the front door. Usually elderly, occasionally middle- aged, hair wet from a bath and wrapped in a cotton towel, with the low whisper of a prayer on her lips.
The domestic help had already been or was inside, sweeping the rooms. The floors were being mopped with disinfectant. The foot of the front door and the ground up to the gate had been washed. On the
wet ground, some mothers and some daughters squatted in deep concentration to draw geometric, often colourful shapes in intricate patterns called
rangoli, to invite prosperity and auspiciousness into their homes as the day began.
Far away from the rangoli, the main door and the house, one lone garbage bag lay awaiting collection.
Dirt, segregated from the clean.
These visuals alongside our conversations, gave us insights into the linguistics and labels that subliminally build context for people. We learned that ‘waste’, ‘filth’ and ‘garbage’ as concepts are universal. They evoke feelings of disgust, stench, germs, ugliness and disease. ‘Cleanliness’ though, is a whole different story.
To the traditional Indian homemaker, the morning was not just a time of day, it was a ritual in itself. In some cases, the woman of the house would first bathe, pray
and only then enter the kitchen to prepare her family’s breakfast. Similarly, in her mind, even a ‘clean house’ had a starting point in time – the morning. It was a symbol for the house’s dusting, sweeping and mopping.
“Clean” meant “pure,” almost akin to holy. Which is why, the purification of the house was only complete when the trash was taken out. So who cleared the trash?
Not the woman, men or children of the house. Taking out the garbage and cleaning the bin were tasks that were seen as impure and dirty. So it was relegated to the help.
The domestic help or maids work for anywhere between four to seven houses everyday and are paranoid about being replaced by another maid for lesser pay or more work. They are under great pressure to finish their work and move on to the next. Interestingly, their work is not judged by how clean a house is, but how long they take to clean it. Conversations with other maids in the neighbourhood ascertained that in contrast to the woman of the house’s idea of ‘purity’, for the maid, cleanliness meant ‘working longer’.
At the end of sweeping, dusting, mopping, doing the dishes and occasionally also handwashing clothes, the maids have a universal cue for ‘goodbye. They sign off by taking out the trash and lining the bin with a new bag.
“They won’t call us back in after we take the garbage out.” A young girl who had been working as help for six years tells us, smiling. What does she do with the garbage, we ask her. She smiles again.
It is the maid’s job to get rid of the offending bag of trash, unless her employers are ok with leaving it outside the gate for the garbage van. She doesn’t think too much about where to throw it. On her way to the next house, she looks for an unmaintained or littered spot, so she doesn’t feel guilty about leaving it there. It well explained the propagation of blindspots.
The obsession with purity inside the house led to another issue for following waste segregation. Segregation needs more than one bin. More bins feel like more trash. It makes the woman incredibly uncomfortable. So unpleasant was the thought of the garbage already, that she had her maid stand in as a buffer between her and the bin. Now, she was being asked to be involved in it, think about what went into it.
The root of the behaviour around waste segregation and blindspots in the municipal lay in the cultural context and the Indian relationship with home and purity. Suddenly, it all made sense. Why millions spent over years on interventions for urban homeowners, imposing hefty fines, clever awareness campaigns on radio, television and outdoor advertising instigating fear of the future, the state of the city, etc. were as useful as the garbage in the landfills they were working to reduce.
We could have suggested providing two coloured bins to each family, designing
a training kit for the woman of the house and her maid, prompting segregation with visual cues and behavioural design, the placement of pick up cans at strategic locations, optimizing pickup schedules and many more. You will agree that these are sensible behavioural interventions.
None of these will work.
As governments, brand custodians, organisations, behavioural architects and practitioners, our bias for action
trains our eyes on where we believe the problem is – in people’s behaviour. But these behaviours are not actions. They are reactions to the patterns we see and judge in our environment, and then find our place within. Simply put, reactions to our context.
In cases like these, where behaviour is not just puppeteered by context but woven in its very fabric, architecting long-term behavioural change, requires architecting a new context altogether.
1001 Stories has been involved in the construction of a new context for the waste segregation problem in select wards. It has confirmed a long suspicion of behavioural science all along. Context is inseparable from human behaviour. In the midst of strategising solutions, this is where we must train our eyes as well.
In the tale of the two travellers, they both fear the river. But their fears are not the same.
The same river means different things to them because of their own past experiences and the collective memory of the societies they come from.
As strategists and researchers, our steadfast gaze on the travelers will never fail our predictions on whether or not they will take their shoes off at the shore.
The why though, will always remain in the river.
Note: A version of this article appeared in the Diversifi Global Annual Compendium 2020
