GUWAHATI: On Indian streets it is common to walk with some measure of disdain and caution. The reason is pretty obvious. Almost all pavements, alleys and even the stairways of public buildings are littered with paan spit in Assam
So have you ever wondered what could be the collective volume of this very ubiquitous paan spit in our state? Well India in Pixels, an infographic visualization digital medium inferred to data from a survey conducted by National Sample Survey Office (in a one-year period between 2011- 2012) on household consumption of various goods and services to arrive at this answer.
Assam can fill 11.54 Olympic sized swimming pools with paan spit. So technically this is nearly a dozen Olympic sized swimming pools. Incidentally, the NSS report includes paan accompanying ingredients like supari, lime, katha etc. but excludes tobacco, zarda, surti, kiman etc.
The sheer volume of this paan spit can be understood when we consider the metrics used by India in Pixels. The volume of one Olympic sized swimming pool is 2.5 million litres. The average density of a single paan spit is (assumed) 1.1 gm/ml and its weight is estimated at 39.55 grams.
G Plus spoke to a couple of people from the city to get their views on why this phenomenon of pan spit litter is so mammoth and growing in Assam.“There is a huge pool of floating population mostly migrant labourers in the city who are contributing to this problem,” says Rajashree Kalita a woman entrepreneur who has a small shop at Uzan Bazar. “Moreover, chewing paan and beetlenut is an age-old customary practice of the people of our state and but obviously most people are not conscious about spitting only in dustbins,” says Kaushik Phukan who has anoutlet of automobile accessories in a bustling marketplace of the city.
For the rest of the north east the visual projections made by India in Pixels are also not very encouraging from the perspective of civic hygiene. Mizoram can fill in 7.96 which is almost 8 Olympic sized pools with paan spit. Nagaland and Meghalaya are close at the third spot. While Nagaland can fill 3.83 Olympic sized pools Meghalaya can fill 3.28 such pools. On the other hand, Manipur can fill 2.63 Olympic sized pools with paan spit while Arunachal and Tripura can fill 0.41 and 0.45 (respectively) space of a standard Olympic swimming pool.
Interesting visual statistics about other Indian states too have been drawn by India in Pixels.
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha can together fill about 105 Olympic size swimming pools with Paan spit every year. And some clinching insights have emerged. Now despite being very small states, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram beat larger states like Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in filling pools with Paan spit. Tamil Nadu can fill more pools with paan spit than Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal and Jammu and Kashmir put together.
It must be mentioned that the household consumption of pan in the specified period of the survey was measured by the quantity actually used/consumed by individual households during the reference period, irrespective of the expenditure incurred on it. This measurement criterion held true for all food articles.
The report is based on information collected during 2011-12 from 101651 households in 7469 villages and 5268 urban blocks spread over the entire country.
