The India of the 1970s & 80s we grew up, became every day an uglier country. It was a place where the very elements of life — earth, water, air — had been poisoned. The land was strewn with garbage, the rivers and urban waterways were choked with plastic bags and white chemical foam. The streets were buckled, the footpaths broken, the air thick and unbreathable. To look out at an Indian city or small town was to be greeted by a bleak sprawl of shoddily constructed low-lying buildings, shrouded in a mantle of brown smoke. It was an apocalyptic landscape with no underlying design save for an ever more urgent need to accommodate greater numbers of people.
Today, India’s environmental problems are among the grimmest in the world. They relate to raw sewage, waste and open defecation, which cause childhood malnourishment, along with diseases like hepatitis, cholera and typhoid fever. The air in the cities is so filthy from factories and cars that middle-class parents now check the levels of PM2.5, or airborne particulate matter, on their smartphones, as people in other places do the weather, before letting their children outside to play.
Courtesy - NY Times - http://nyti.ms/1ILjNXL
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