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Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Of course it is true that a lot of Indians have no civic sense, and will spit, litter, and generally make a noisy nuisance of themselves in this quiet village. On the surface it seems to be a great story about that nuisance being kicked out one day of the week.
At the same time, this is part of...India. It seems questionable legally, and also morally, to just kick out people from the rest of the country and even the state on a a specific day. Your village benefits to some degree from their taxes. How would it be if the villagers were locked into their village for that day and not allowed to travel outside?
Is the solution to a lack of civic sense really just to make more and more of these clean enclaves? Will they finally end up expanding and covering more of the country? I would honestly feel better about this if the entire state of Meghalaya had some kind of cleanliness drive and a tourist tax.
I don't have any easy solutions. If I did, they would have occurred to someone in India and it would be a lot cleaner by now.
Did you read the article?
> Visitors who book guesthouse rooms in Mawlynnong through Saturday and Sunday are exempt from the Sunday ban.
Culture is real.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the change on the Internet (at least not the English Internet), but this Japanese guy's anecdotes seem to corroborate it [2]. It makes sense, a lot of countries started taking pollution and littering more seriously around the 70s. It looks like that's when Japan started regulating it seriously [3]:
> from 24 November to 18 December 1970, 14 pollution control bills were passed into law [...] overnight, Japan was transformed from a country with meagre environmental regulations, to one of the strictest in the OECD.
1. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PP60G-lMiDA
2. https://tour-hiro.com/blog/culture/5721/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_Diet
When they are able/willing to enforce consequences for bad behavior, most of India's civic problems will evaporate.
In terms of actually responding to eco-disaster I don't think people are there yet to see error and mend their ways. I do not expect this to change at least for next couple of decades.
That's because of zoning. Much of Gurgaon isn't zoned as a municipality but as villages or agricultural land, which means there is no unified municipal government in vast swathes of the city. This is the same issue with Bangalore.
Other large Indian cities (eg. Pune, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc) are nowhere near as bad
> So I was particularly glad to see this story was about an Indian village
My ancestral family is from village and small towns, and counterintuitively (edit: for people who do not know India) they tend to be much cleaner because they have more formally defined municipal and local governments.
Of course, this depends state to state, like everything else in India.
Edit: quick explaination of local government in India
Local government in India is heavily dependent on whether your block is zoned as "rural", "urban", "agricultural", or "industrial".
In the first generation of megacities like Bangalore and Delhi NCR, zoning never actually got updated because a lot of urbanization happened before zoning caught up, and changing zoning could impact your tax burden, as agricultural income isn't taxed in India.
So if you are a landlord (eg.) running a backpacker hostel in Delhi, if your land was rezoned from agricultural to urban it would also be reassessed from a tax burden perspective so landlords have an incentive to fight rezoning tooth and nail.
Additionally, a lot of areas that are colloquially called (eg.) Bangalore aren't actually within the borders of the city of Bangalore but historically unzoned or miszoned land.
In smaller towns and the newer generation of megacities (eg. Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune) zoning was more tightly enforced and local governments are more aligned becuase they are much more homogenous.
This is something the PM Office is now starting to address [0], but will also depend on local and state governments. Some states like Kerala, HP, TN, Punjab, and Gujarat have been more proactive about fixing zoning, but others like Delhi and Karnataka have been less inclined.
[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...
Indian, and this is not counterintuitive to me at all. I have also seen this, really small rural villages with their tight local governments tend to be pretty clean.
This needs to be a thing everywhere. Education works to resolve most - if not all - social issues.
If it were so simple this would've been solved nation wide by Modi's 2014 address.
Where does this education come from? Leaders, but leaders are product of their social environment. To create this change means to go against the norm meaning someone or a few have to break the trend. Then that belief has to take hold in others and THEN the real test begins. It has to be generational, the new generation, by yes, education, needs it to be truth as opposed to a new way. The old guard must die.
Only then will you "solve all social issues by education". Don't even get me started on scale. It works on a village or small country, but more? or a 2nd issue?
It's some combination of moral education, culture, science, and psychology. Even religion can play a role, especially in India where it's so important for a majority of the people.
What? How is this supposed to work?
But it also highlights how you need to restrict access to move up the value chain. Hordes of bus tourists who eat elsewhere or bring take away contribute little economically, you can sell some trinkets. People with a hotel booking are also likely to eat locally.
Venice faces a similar situation with cruise ships and Airbnbs raising the price of housing. They should be capping cruise ship numbers, and a weekend break would be good too.
I don't think this fits the story at all. They just want a day off. The rest of the week is unrestricted.
You could tweak it in many ways, like additional levy that can be recouped by spending on food in local restaurants (vs shipboard all-inclusive meals).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_sales_ban_in_Singa...
> Some tourists have complained about the ban, saying it should have been implemented on a weekday instead
These should not be a thing. What is it that makes folk feel so entitled?
"Lack of litter bins"; isn't an excuse. I've seen folk stand next to a litter bin, light up and then throw the cigarettes end to the ground.
You're literally standing next to a litter bin!
It should be common sense not to spit nor to litter. Spitting is the worse and I see it all the time here in the UK.
I only really have experience with Americans and Bangladeshis, but in my experience Americans are Nazis about littering and recycling. I was talking with a law school professor once after class and dropped a diet coke bottle into the trash in front of her. Without missing a beat she reached into the trash bin to take it out and threw it into the recycling bin.
America is a really big place.
My "progressive" American city has a lot of litter, because there is no money to clean it up or punish litterers.
I've been in quite a few American cities where recycling bins simply do not exist.
I don't know about that. I've seen many a poorly sorted recycle bin in my life. Americans are definitely in the upper quartile, maybe even the upper decile, of the world as a whole. Among the developed world the country may be just about average.
I believe glass recycling is segregated by color in some countries in Europe. And they take that really seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stream_recycling
I guess my bar is on the floor lol.
If the litter bin doesn’t have an ashtray (like most in the US), maybe they were worried about starting a trash fire?
In parts of Asia where people chew betel nut, of course that’s a different story -they put the old west custom of spitting tobacco chew to shame.
Spitting is still super common in many cities, especially in India. I've had a few taxi drivers who would open their door periodically to spit on the ground (and no they weren't chewing anything).
What the hell is wrong with people?
Or in Seinfeld speak, “we live in a society!!!”
Have to consider others not just oneself. That’s the price of freedom and being responsible about it.
The alternative is a nanny state or anarchy.
If the law ruled: "you may not traverse through the state on Sundays"; then one could argue that is a breach of human rights.
However, the last time I checked, detours exist. Enabling you to bypass a village that may be closed on Sundays.
If you're a tourist and a village says no, why can't you obey that, why does that upset you?
The actual content is about a self-proclaimed 'Asia's cleanest village' in India, banning Sunday visits from other domestic Indians.
Probably wouldn't be a popular story if this was revealed in the title.
Japan is Japan.