Study India Programme

Finished the Delhi programme on Friday. Interesting things:

Did a weeks mini-internship at 'Toxicslink', who do sustainable waste management. First we went to a landfill site; literally a mountain of waste (the best view of Delhi we ever had) that had been building for about a decade. Interesting that it isn't buried as it would be in the UK. (Pics of all this stuff will be on facebook) Then we went to a community composting site in one of the rich Delhi suburbs (defense colony) where biodegradable waste is sent to avoid it being taken to landfill. It seemed like a good idea, considering the small amount of space it took up, and the lack of an unpleasant smell, and I wondered whether its done in the UK. Then we went to an E-waste facility: this was amazing. These guys had a collection of vats filled with sulphuric and hydrochloric acid into which they would dump circuit boards from old computers, TVs etc. The acid would melt off the copper, which would then be collected at the bottom of the vat and sold on. The place was insane, thousands of circuit boards stacked up, and great charred masses of them with all the layers coming off.

Also spent a week at Delhi university. This was a surprise, we attended history/politics/geography lectures at what were meant to be some of the elite educational institutions of India (St Steven's college and Kiori Mal college), but the lecturers were nothing special, and more strikingly, the students chatted with each other throughout and didn't seem to be paying any attention. The facilities weren't too great either, but this is just a matter of money; the atmosphere was the real problem. I'd expected the standards to be higher; for some reason I had an image of Indian students as being incredibly hard working and dedicated to taking over the world. I realised how even a university that wouldn't be seen as too great in the West is still a big step up.

New Delhi is interesting because its all colonial architecture, which means wide tree lined boulevards, and expensive neighborhoods filled with neoclassical structures, designed for Brits, now hosting Delhi's elite. There's a few new super-modern outlying areas springing up though, such as Noida (New Okla Industrial Development area) with steel and glass tower blocks + there's a nice new air conditioned metro, for which they've stolen the London underground logo.