While ascending the winding roads to a popular hill station, I was amused to see a signboard declaring the hill station as a ‘No Plastic Zone’. A plastic carry-bag dangling from the board, foretold what was in store. One could not help but compare it with the signboards one encounters in government offices, declaring that demanding and giving a bribe is an offence.
Plastic and corruption have found a firm place in our society almost simultaneously, from the late Sixties. Before the plastic invasion, due to the scarcity of packaging material there used to be adequate conservation and recycling of material resources. As a young boy, I used to admire the deftness of grocery shop assistants, in packaging groceries. One person would weigh different items while another would put everything in a paper bag made then and there. With a juggler’s prowess the boys would go about with their work.
Before the advent of plastic carry-bags, sheer necessity inculcated a sense of responsibility to recycle, re-use and re-shape materials. Small and obscure eateries would provide newspaper bits as tissues for drying hands; roadside tea stalls would use it as disposable paper plates to serve snacks. Plastic carry-bags by their sheer convenience and cheap availability dislodged recycled paper and lodged themselves firmly in every sphere of our life, creating havoc. Many of the plastic carry-bags end up choking water drains, polluting the soil and also find their way into our rivers and lakes. Like the non-biodegradable plastic waste forming an impenetrable sheath, the socially degradable corruption hinders benefits percolating to the needy.
Like plastics, corruption was a rare phenomenon a few decades back. In the mid-Sixties, a man came in search of my father early in the morning, carrying a big jackfruit. I was fondling the jackfruit with expectation, when my father came from the bath wrapped in a towel. When he saw the man and the jack fruit, he started yelling, incomprehensible phrases and the man scurried, carrying away the jackfruit. Years later I came to understand that the jackfruit was intended to be a small bribe to hasten some files from my father’s desk. However, the guilt associated with corruption in the past, is not a taboo and is also praised as smartness now.
Demanding and accepting a bribe used to be discreet in the Sixties and it was as rare as the plastic carry-bags those days. Today, both plastic and corruption have become so rampant and all pervading, one gets a feeling that both cannot be eradicated from our system. Perhaps the people who matter, shirk their responsibility by putting a board, declaring it as no plastic zone and no bribe zone. Both the evils can be tackled and done away with. For that we have to start following it rather than expecting to follow others.