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Mumbai flooded as plastic bags choke drains
Added: (Fri Jun 24 2005)
Yesterday Mumbai city was inundated by floods. The megacity, India’s business hub was paralyzed.
Cost: Billions of dollars and a miserable day for residents who couldn’t make it to hospitals, schools and places of work.
Most flights were either cancelled or diverted to Ahmedabad, and trains were cancelled or ran hours late.
Mumbai has an intense monsoon. You can expect incessant downpours at least 4 times every year.
The downpours aren’t new. They’ve been coming to India’s west coast for hundreds of years.
But the intensity of flooding is new and getting worse every year.
One of the major culprits is the increasing number of plastic bags that are choking drainage systems.
India actually has laws banning the use of such plastic bags, but like most laws in India, they exist only on the books. No one knows about them, no one follows them, and no one appears to care.
Ironically, India is a major exporter of reusable cloth bags.
Rajiv Badlani, who runs Norquest Brands (http://www.badlani.com/bags) says they ship reusable cloth bags every day of the week to other countries as they take effective steps to reduce plastic bag usage, says he doesn’t have any customers in India. His company’s entire output is exported.
Badlani’s weblog on the subject (http://www.badlani.com/blog) is being acknowledged by readers around the world as a primary source of information on the problems caused by plastic bags and the solutions communities have found, but he finds that hardly any Indians read it.