In 2019, Prime Minister Modi, in typical style, announced that India would be free of single-use plastic by 2022. Just as with so many other issues, he discovered that just his saying something should happen doesn't help. In less than a year, the ambitious plan was quietly retired because it would be too disruptive to business and the economy.
Plastic is a global problem and one that needs a very nuanced and planned approach. If it was hard to get rid of single-use plastic earlier, the COVID-era has made it almost impossible. Plastic offers the common person just too much benefit to be able to wish it away because it makes for good headlines.
Just as with the Swachch Bharat idea, this one too has been taken up with no study of the problem. While Mr. Modi's supporters will tell you that the idea to have an open-defecation free India is Modi's brainchild, the fact is that Rajiv Gandhi already tried this in 1986. Almost all the pieces of the Swachch Bharat campaign are taken from Central Rural Sanitation Programme. Modi's contributions are limited to the name and using Gandhiji's glasses on the logo. Instead, if the government would have looked back at the CRSP and tried to identify why it failed, we might have actually made some progress.
The same is the case with plastics. It is easy for Mr. Modi who hasn't gone to a grocery store in over a decade to tell people not to use plastics. The reality is very different.
Let's take the example of the plastic cola bottle. The end-user doesn't really care whether the cola is in a plastic bottle or a glass one. But the cola companies do. Glass bottles are more expensive than plastic bottles and hence it is for their benefit and not ours. In the olden days, grocers charged you a deposit for the bottle which would be returned if you returned the bottle. These bottles then went back to the cola maker who had to bear the cost of washing and sterilizing them before reusing them. It was a brilliant system and we should consider bringing it back.
But it cannot be done overnight. While this was infrastructure cola companies had at one point in time, that has not been dismantled. They need time to set up the infrastructure again. Most probably, in today's world it will get outsourced to a bottle-washing company. This will generate more low-end employment. I can see states such as UP and Bihar set up such plants and bring in valuable money for the state.
Of course, then there is the water and pollution problem to tackle. A plant to wash and sterilize cola bottles will need water, a lot of water. This will mean that these bottle washing companies must be given incentives to set up water treatment plants so that they use less ground water.
As you can see, each step of the process brings in both much needed employment and advances in technology, which can only augur well for the state and the country.
We don't need superheroes who make grand but empty statements. Instead we need visionary leaders who aren't afraid to lean on experts for advice and ideas.
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