De Cleanup Job

I live in Delhi. A place I've always thought of as home, but also a massive mess. There's the standard attitude of "I'll mess it up - the people paid to clean should do their jobs properly". I still remember a while ago (when the BJP came to power) seeing this strange man sweeping the road in front of our house. My mother asked him a few questions and found that this man had been responsible for sweeping the road outside our house for a few years now - only now he was actually doing his job. The city cleaned up quite a bit with all the people who'd been employed to do their jobs for years actually starting to do them.





At some point of time, the government got smart - there's only one way to make sure the job gets done properly (and continuously) without having someone sit on all the cleaners heads...





OUTSOURCE!





Hey, if I give you assurance that irrespective of whether your job gets done or not, I'm not going to fire you/cut your pay/irritate you at all in any way and you're a slacker, you're not going to get your job done. On the other hand, if I call a contractor and tell them to clean the place up, then as soon as they screw up, I jump on them and tell em I'm not going to pay them - I become king... yay! Plus, I get to pay them less by putting out bids for the job of cleaning the place.





So there you have it. I drive to work every day - occasionally see a very hip looking cleaning truck trundling along the side of the road whipping up all the dust, dirt, plastic, excrement, blah into it's large belly. The roads? They're squeaky clean in Delhi now.





But back the truck up just a minute (pun intended). Where do these trucks empty their guts?

Well, it would seem to me that they dump the stuff quite a distance from where they pick it up - a few inches perhaps? This is a picture I took yesterday when I was heading back home from Nehru Place (a sprawling commercial complex in Delhi) just accross the road from the famous Kalka Mandir.

Hang on... lets get a little closer...

So THESE are the guys cleaning up the roads. Yesterday after I saw (and photographed) this, I thought of two things - going to the Kalkaji police station (about 100m away) and telling them (I actually went, but was in a bit of a rush to get home, so thought I'd just blog it and send it to the papers). The second was that I hadn't really looked at the sides of the roads for quite a while - they're dirtier than ever before - I guess now I know why. Maybe these contractors are planning on asking for a contract to clean the sides of the roads as well.

I drove up to the truck and motioned for the driver to push back his window - he motioned for me to drive round to the other side of the truck which I did. His "co-pilot" gave me a big grin while he pushed his window open. I asked one question "is this the rubbish dump?" to which his immediate reply was "yes".

I'm thinking I should send this around a bit more than just to the papers. Lets see what happens.