What rubbish! It’s high-end on Everest

According to a recent report, PM Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat campaign is not only going transnational but also scaling new heights: in a concerted six-week clean-up drive, a 14-member team put together by the Nepali government working with environment groups, retrieved some 10 tonnes of garbage — including plastic water bottles, tin cans and discarded climbing equipment — from the altitudes as high as 26,000-plus ft on Mount Everest. Decades of near-unregulated climbing — by, among others, a contingent of the People’s Liberation Army, which claimed to have relied on inspirational Mao songs rather than oxygen cylinders — had turned the mightiest of Himalayas, named after British surveyor George Everest, into the ‘world’s highest junkyard’ that might more aptly be called Mount Neverest.

Ridding Everest of its accumulated rubbish is not only environmental but also economic sense. The trash is being turned into a variety of designer goods, ranging from drinking glasses, to utensils, to light fixtures, which are being snapped up by five-star hotels and fashionable boutiques that can legitimately claim to be high-end. But perhaps the best reason to justify the retrieval of Everest’s junk would be contained in a repeat of George Mallory’s famous response as to why he wanted to climb the mountain, “Because it is there.”