Every evening, my drive home follows the same route – and, lately, the same sight. A school bus window slides open, and out flies a crumpled wrapper. A car window rolls down at a signal, and a plastic bottle lands on the road as if it were a bin. These are not stray incidents. They happen often enough that I’ve stopped being surprised, and started asking a harder question: who is doing this?
The answer, more often than not, is us – the educated, the comfortable, the ones who can afford a car, a school fee, a phone. Not the poor, not the illiterate, not the people we sometimes blame for civic carelessness. Students on their way from school. Families in private vehicles. People who have read textbooks on ecosystems and environmental science, who can recite the dangers of plastic pollution in an exam – and yet toss that same plastic onto the very soil they were taught to protect.
There is a particular irony here that’s hard to ignore. In many of our homes, the cow is worshipped – garlanded, fed by hand, treated as sacred. Yet the same reverence rarely extends to what she actually eats. Plastic bags and wrappers, carelessly discarded, end up in her stomach as often as they end up by the roadside. We fold our hands before an idol and litter behind her back. That contradiction says something uncomfortable about the distance between our rituals and our real regard for the earth.
It would be easy to write this off as a small, personal failing – a wrapper here, a bottle there. But scale it up. Multiply one bus by every school route in the city. Multiply one car by every household that owns one. What looks like a minor lapse in individual behavior becomes, collectively, a slow and steady poisoning of our roads, our soil, and the animals who wander them looking for food and finding garbage instead.
This raises a question worth sitting with: what is education actually for, if it doesn’t change how we behave? We have built a system that teaches facts about the environment – the water cycle, biodiversity, climate change – but rarely teaches the discipline of care. A student can score full marks in environmental studies and still throw a chip packet out of a moving bus without a second thought. Somewhere between the classroom and the commute, knowledge stops translating into conduct.
Fixing this doesn’t require a new policy from the top; it requires a shift much closer to home. One could make bus conduct part of student discipline, not just classroom behavior – a monitor on board, a consequence for littering, a conversation about why it matters. Colleges and housing societies could run visible, recurring clean-up drives, not as one-off publicity events but as a standing expectation. And parents, frankly, could model the behavior they hope their children absorb – because a child who sees a parent roll down the car window to toss trash learns far more from that gesture than from any classroom lesson on pollution.
None of this is complicated. It doesn’t need funding or infrastructure. It needs only the will to carry a wrapper home instead of dropping it out a window – a small act, repeated by enough people, that could actually change what our roads, our soil, and our sacred cows are fed every single day.
The next time you’re stuck behind a school bus or beside a parked car, watch the windows. What you see will tell you more about the state of our civic sense.
By Reshma Gowramma Machamada.
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