CULTURAL STANCE OF PEOPLE OF RAJASTHAN ON FRUGAL AND ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY PRACTICES

Rajasthan- the land of kings, is known for its food, culture and deserts. Many communities including the Rajputs, Jats, Baniyas, Gujjars, etc. call Rajasthan their home. However, the people of Rajasthan, specifically the Marwari or Baniya communities, are known for their extremely frugal lifestyles. They are known to utilize their assets to their maximum capabilities as well as getting discounts, even if that means saving a rupee. But do their frugal lifestyles include environmental friendly practices; conforming to the presumption that frugality, minimalism and environment friendly practices do go hand in hand? This post aims to uncover the lives of people of Rajasthan, enlist some of the most popular Rajasthani practices and bring forth their environmental practices.

The first instance is about Chula, an alternative cooking instrument. The LPG prices in India have been skyrocketing since forever. Apart from the regular gas cylinder fee, there are additional prices such as taking a gas connection in first place and getting gas stoves, etc. To avoid such costs, people in rural Rajasthan have been known to use Chula instead of gas stoves. This saves them a lot of money as they do not have to give a monthly fee for LPG and other setup charges. Also, Chula takes almost no additional charge. To set it up, one needs some bricks and dry tree branches to light the fire.

But this approach has proven to be really harmful to the environment. Firstly, people cut trees, to collect the dry branches for igniting the fire. This has led to serious deforestation in rural Rajasthan. Secondly, the smoke from the Chula leads to serious air pollution. The Chula releases solid fuel soot, which then emits substantial amounts of health-damaging pollutants, including particulates, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, benzene, formaldehyde, 1,3-butadiene, and polyaromatic compounds such as benzo(α)pyrene. According World Health Organization, this accounts for more than 25% premature household air pollution deaths in India, every year, of the 4.3 million global deaths.

The second instance is about menstrual hygiene. Though the National Family Health Survey 2015-16 has shown that 48.2% of rural women use some kind of menstrual protection, there still exists a major issue. Most of the people in rural Rajasthan think that sanitary pads costs more than their utilization. Therefore, they prefer local pads or even worse still, cloth-pieces during the course of their menstrual cycles. The same index substantiates this argument by depicting that most lower- or middle-class families prefer such cloth-pieces during their menstrual cycle. There have been several studies which show that using cloth-pieces as a means of menstrual protection is not the most effective method; and more often than not leads to serious health issues such as cervical cancer, rashes on the thighs due to friction, etc.

The third instance relates to the ways in which people in Rajasthan consume plastics. Whenever people travel in trains or go on a picnic, it is a common practice to carry home-cooked food with them. This practice helps to save up money, especially in the long run. This is one of the minimalistic practices everyone hopes to inculcate; but the art of which the people of Rajasthan have mastered. The issue with this practice is the way they store and carry this food. Usually, people carry plastic cutlery with them and store food in plastic mithai boxes. This vastly increases the plastic consumption and people thereafter frequently end up littering the places around. This proves to be harmful to the environmental balance as there are government reports which claim that garbage disposal system in the state of Rajasthan is not yet fully efficient- large portions of these garbage end up not being processed in these disposal systems and therefore add to air and land pollution.

To conclude, the author would like to point out that there are many practices which the people of Rajasthan follow that are minimalistic, frugal and environment friendly. However, this article only focuses on those practices which are not the most environmental-friendly. People in Rajasthan are wired to be frugal and to save every last rupee, yet being environment friendly is sadly not a habit they have tended to inculcate. What is sought to be highlighted through this post is that all such practices, irrespective of them not being environmental-friendly, are in their core meant to be frugal. It is purely coincidental when both these motives of being frugal as well as being environmental friendly are achieved in a few instances.