Life in Yelahanka Through A Socio-Cultural Lens: Project Proposal (Initial)

General Aim

The group, after making a lot of observations, decided to dwell on the fact that there is very little understanding about how to deal with the waste among residents of India. 

Since we are here to take a socio-cultural approach to the problem, our project aims to understand:

1. The psychology behind the fact that educated urban people do not carefully segregate or necessarily recycle their waste.
2. The culture behind saving and using that was ancient India, that today is only limited to the street side garbage scavengers.
3. The culture/ attitude behind not caring about public space itself – not “owning” the space or the waste and why this happens. Eg. spitting and chewing of beetlenut and pan. Here, we like to think of examples of work done by The Ugly Indian as inspiration and reference material.

Observations by the group

Since I haven’t interacted with the whole group, I’m going to let everybody else fill this in.

[please add stuff, guys]

Specific Research Questions

What is it that will make recycling/ reusing more prevalent among all brackets of society– across caste, class, age, gender, or any demographic? (ie. How not to aim only at one sort of demographic by some sort of default?) What are the already existing cultural cues we can use as quick tricks in order to get the heart of the matter and sensitise the people? [Here, we thought of the experiment that put pictures of Indian gods on all the streets where the men usually went to pee – and as a result, it was found that no one peed there any more. Again, it could be argued that this is not the way to get to the heart of the matter; it is only a short-term trick. It would perhaps not be a longer-lasting case of conscientiousness and agency. So how to create long-lasting agency and conscientiousness?]

Problem focus

Lucky for us, we do know a place where a large number of demographic boundaries merge into nothingness and people of all sorts unite.

This is the chai kadai.

Being faithful to our earlier interest of garbage dumping etc, we thought of focusing on only one kind of ubiquitous waste specific to this people-uniting space: the plastic chai cups.

• How shall we try and create awareness about the simple fact that we should not be using and throwing chai cups?
• Not only is it a hazard to the environment, a health hazard with any kind of plastic cups is that whenever plastic contains hot food, it can be cancerous. [source]

Ideas for Execution

1. In order to show people how much is being wasted, we decided to collect chai cups from the Kadai in a bin for all the Srishti working hours in a basket next to the Kadai (with some form of an intriguing sign) for 1 working day – Monday.
2. On Tuesday, our plan is to build a sculpture with the collected cups that conveys a simple message somewhere on it that tell facts about how many cups were wasted and how much potential damage it holds to the entire ecosystem (demonstrated in pictures), health hazards for humans etc. This will be displayed at as many Kadais as there are members in our group (five), and the member from the group will photograph the reactions of the people who come there, while dually gauging how correct our earlier assumption that kadais merge a lot of the demographic.
3. One more idea was, if the Kadais agree to it, is that when people bring their own cups, or prefer to use steel/ glass cups provided by the shop, they are provided by a little token by us - perhaps a sticker, or a recycled object saying "thank you for saving the environment by xyz statistic"

 I am sure that once the group meets, these ideas will either change or be totally replaced by new ones! So let's see again on Tuesday when all the paperwork with FRRO is done!