In late October, the streets of the temple town of Thanjavur were abuzz with Diwali festivities, the skies glittering with fireworks. One home, however, was cloaked in darkness.

“We aren’t celebrating Diwali because we are in mourning this year,” said K Kumaran, just back from his 10-hour shift as a security guard at a private college. In the corner of the living room, his wife Vijaya fixes the wick on a flickering oil lamp that stood in front of a framed photograph of their 19-year-old son, Jawahar. “If he was here, my son would have approved of the dark house,” said Vijaya. “He thought firecrackers were polluting, and environmentally disastrous.” Jawahar, a young community activist in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, had killed himself less than a month earlier.



Jawahar Kumara, in a photograph held by his father. Photograph: Rohini Moran

He had left home after breakfast on 10 October, and did not return or call home all day. “At first, we didn’t think it was unusual,” said Kumaran, sighing. Jawahar had been a strenuous activist, often out on protests around the area. Earlier this year, he had gone on a hunger fast; he sat on the road outside a central tourist spot, demanding that city officials confiscate all plastic bags. Before that, he had climbed the Collector’s [government] office building, threatening to jump off unless Thanjavur enforced the plastic ban. On both occasions, it was the police that called Kumaran and Vijaya, asking them to take their boy home after he had been detained. In many other instances, the parents had found out about Jawahar’s public protests through the local Tamil newspapers.

But after a day had passed this time and there had still been no word from their son, Kumaran filed a missing person’s complaint, on Vijaya’s insistence. That evening the police found him; he had drowned in the canal. No one suspected suicide until, on the day of the cremation, a cousin found a video in Jawahar’s phone.



“It was a declaration of suicide,” said the cousin, K Elavaenil. In the self-recorded video, the religious Jawahar wears holy ash on his forehead. Speaking in Tamil he says, “I am sacrificing my life in the hope that it will trigger serious concern about plastic use in India. Since all of my peaceful means of protest failed, I’m forced to choose suicide. To save the lives of millions of people affected by toxic plastic, I don’t think it’s wrong to kill myself.”

He used to say that people are dull and lazy, and one must shock to attract attention to important issues K Elavaenil, Jawahar's cousin

As a teenager, Jawahar had shown a keen interest in environmental issues, especially the indiscriminate use of plastic. He quit school in the 10th grade and watched the news obsessively. From 2014, every few weeks, he had filed petitions at the town municipality demanding an action plan to ban or recycle plastic, manage waste, or replant trees cut for laying highways. Soon, he began to stage dramatic protests. “He used to say that people are dull and lazy, and one must shock to attract attention to important issues,” said Elavaenil.

Officials in the police station of Thanjavur remember Jawahar as a passionate boy. “He was a known face, always in the Collector’s office, fighting about this or that,” said Inspector R Rajendran, who once convinced the young man to climb down from the roof of the building. “His heart was in the right place, but what he didn’t understand is that making the town a zero-plastic zone cannot happen overnight.”

Jawahar’s father K Kumaran reading from his son’s diary. Photograph: Rohini Moran

Vijaya said: “Jawahar was fighting alone and growing angrier with the world. When all you can think of is how to protect the environment, just seeing a person use a plastic cover can perhaps push you over the edge.”

Jawahar had taken on a gargantuan problem. India is a relatively new user of plastic, which has only really come into circulation since the economy was liberalised in the early nineties. Indians consume a relatively small amount of plastic per person — a fraction of the amount consumed in the US and Chinaestimated at 9.7kg in 2013, far below 109kg in the US and 45kg in China. But plastic use has been growing at 10% a year, and consumption is expected to double by 2020.

There has been some action; in 2011 the Indian parliament banned the use and manufacture of plastic bags with a thickness of under 40 microns. But waste management is really a state responsibility, and although civic bodies in villages, municipalities and cities were supposed to implement this ban locally, few did. Delhi, for example, imposed a blanket ban on the manufacture, use and sale of plastic bags in 2013, but a 2015 report [pdf] by the NGO Toxic Links found that over 90% of traders still used them. In March this year, the central government notified the Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016, which would supersede the 2011 rues. It bans bags under 50 microns, but has a long list of exemptions, and allows companies and vendors to continue the manufacture and use of plastic after paying a fine.

A woman carries plastic containers in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. Photograph: Dinodia Photo/Getty Images/Passage

It’s hard to miss plastic in the Indian landscape. Irrigation pipes made from the worst grade of plastic snake through rural farmland. Homemakers spread a plastic sheet on the dining table, and line their cupboards. Street-food vendors will wrap a cut mango or piping hot samosa in plastic while the tea sellers use tiny, slim plastic cups that are crushed after a single use. Cling film, colourful food wrappers, packets and water bottles fly out of buses to line the peripheries of train tracks all over the country. Nearly every middle-class Indian home hoards plastic bags; dozens of them stuffed in another large plastic bag. Finally, they are all carelessly thrown away. It’s common to find cows and goats eating the plastic mixed in overflowing garbage at street corners and landfills. These are often burned, emitting noxious fumes. Drains are clogged with shreds of plastic, leading to flooded sewers that trigger malaria and dengue.

Local grassroots groups have managed to bring about progress in some parts of India. In several neighbourhoods in Bengaluru, for example, capital of Karnataka, nearly 3,000 volunteers help enforce a homegrown, multidimensional and interactive model of managing plastic waste. The Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT) was started in 2009, with a handful of eco-organisations, middle-class consumers, and vendors meeting once a week to discuss solutions. The SWMRT now includes wastepickers’ associations, recyclers, residents’ welfare groups, shopkeepers, politicians and corporations.

By 2015, 20 wards in Bengaluru had already stopped using all kinds of plastic. The movement demonstrated the power of enlightened officials and well-thought out citizen alternatives like bags borrowed from shopkeepers on a deposit, a return to steel containers for meat, glass for liquids, newspaper packing for groceries, neighbourhood “kabaadi” (recycler) rounds, and networked wastepickers and consumers.

Civic officials, working with the SWMRT, have implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags through raids and awareness campaigns, while volunteers promote habits like composting that massively cut the quantity of garbage generated per household. The most significant move, however, has been to rope in the largely informal economy of wastepickers. India maintains a very high recycling rate – 60% compared to the world average of 22% – with little government support because of the economic value of the waste. “Anything that has value gets picked up from the waste and leaves the system,” says Kabir Arora, coordinator of the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers.

Plastic bottles float on the Bagmati river in the Himalayas. Photograph: DimaBerkut/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Single-use plastic stays in landfills because they have no recycle value at all. But multi-use plastic like packaging material or thick bags are reincarnated – 25% was being recycled in India in 2013, according to the PlastIndia Foundation. And 70% of PET bottles in India are recycled, compared to only 3% in the US.

“All this is possible due to the informal system of what we call ‘ragpickers’,” says Nalini Shekar, the co-founder of an association of 7,000 wastepickers, Hasiru Dala. “The desperately poor people who spend hours rummaging in the landfill, the unorganised labour that manually sorts dry waste, migrants and women who identify and separate types of plastic, [all] work in extremely unhygienic, unsafe conditions to keep plastic off our soil and water.” An estimated 600,000 people work in plastic recycling in India. In Delhi at least 25,000 people are directly employed in recycling, and they are supported by thousands of independent collectors and handlers.

Children looking through rubbish on landfill site in

Calcutta. Photograph: WIN-Initiative/Getty Images

But it is all still informal, and adhoc and systemic problems remain. “The recycling sector still needs more organising, scientific research and government regulation to make it a sustainable player in plastic management,” says Shekar, another member of Bengaluru’s SWMRT. For example, until recently recyclers commonly burned PVC wires to recover the high-price copper and aluminium metals – releasing carcinogenic dioxins – until the Central Pollution Control Board enforced a ban.

Progress is haphazard, episodic, and local, no matter how well intentioned. And meanwhile cloth-like polypropylene bags (only banned in Karnataka), branded packaging for chips, crisps and toffees, water bottles, sanitary napkins, diapers towels, nappies with 90% plastic microbeads, and paper cups lined with plastic, are all still flooding garbage rubbish dumps.

Tamil Nadu, Jawahar’s home state, is the most heavily urbanised [pdf] in India, and hosts numerous heavy industries in energy, automobiles, transport and leather. The capital, Chennai, is one of India’s fastest growing mega-cities, and the rapidly growing number of cars in the state has now led to an anti-air pollution drive. The state, like the country, is changing rapidly.



Jawahar campaigned to his utmost in this huge, rapidly changing landscape. In his own town, he went to every house on the street, confiscating their plastic. He harangued local vegetable vendors, and his own parents. His mother Vijaya showed me her kitchen – entirely steel and glass. She guiltily picked up a plastic bottle of oil. “It might be his growing impatience with this world that led him to give up his life,” she says. “Maybe things would have been different, if some people had joined him in his mission.”

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

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