This expat world in New Delhi always strikes me as so small. So few people, consistently bumping into each other at similar parties and bars — and under a small family of international employers too.
The World Bank consultant, the visiting journalist, the social investment analyst, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation public health specialist. And then there are the many Western-educated local Indians as well. People like my friend Neeraj Doshi, who is helping build sustainable eco-tourism in India.
Now, I can bump into their voices too. NPR has done a piece on Indian-Americans in India tackling problems of pollution. It’s a bit optimistic and shiny, but it is still nice to know that for the past six months, I’ve been had the privilege to meet the kind of idealistic people whose voices would be picked up by NPR. Not that one should look to radio interviews for validation of one’s peer group.
Young Indians Abroad Return to Help Better Country
Neeraj Doshi hopes to finance a new garbage collection company in India.
Ragpickers in India sort through trash. There’s so much trash, though, that much of it just gets left on the ground.
Morning Edition, April 28, 2008 ยท Traveling though India’s capital Delhi, one will see trash in both good and bad neighborhoods. Piles of trash, splayed across the sidewalk and along the curb can sit, uncollected, for days.
Eventually, someone comes along and removes the piles, but a few days or even hours later, the trash is back. It’s almost never segregated for recycling.
“Trash is just trash,” says Vinay Prakash, a young businessman who is helping create one of India’s first waste-recycling companies, EcoWise Waste Management. “Primarily, we don’t have any, any sense of category of waste. It’s just waste with us.”
But young Indians who grew up in Britain, Australia and America are now arriving here, hanging out with Indian friends, and important conversations about climate change and the enviroment are starting.
For example, Neeraj Doshi, an Indian who went to graduate school in America, met a British woman who joined a foundation in London. The group asked Doshi to help finance recycling projects in India. So, he started EcoWise Waste Management. The company is putting up signs in Noida, a city outside of Delhi, offering private trash collection for apartments and local businesses.
All over India, projects to fight trash, pollution, global warming and poverty are attracting kids from the Indian diaspora who want to spend a few years, or maybe longer, pushing for social change in the mother country. For many, that means increasingly better jobs and pretty good pay, not to mention the chance to hang out with an international gang of friends.
But their parents often object.
“I had stiff resistance from every member of my family,” says Ranu Sinha, who works with the World Bank. She says her relatives in India and her parents in the United States were asking, “‘What are you doing? We didn’t put you through very expensive institutions of education for you to go back and make far less than you would be making here in the U.S.’”
Still, they keep coming.
Radio piece produced by Jessica Goldstein.
