The City of Smells

For all India's exotic spices, the pervasive smell of Delhi is of urine. This is especially true at the train stations where the scent of urine persistently pushes its way through the cracks in the windows of the train and invades the nostrils. But it gets worse. Every drain and river in Delhi vociferously exudes the same sickly sweet odour, a combination of excrement, urine, vomit, damp and rotting food. You learn to anticipate it's assault on your senses every time you drive over a bridge or a culvert.

In the beginning it puzzled me. I have travelled quite a bit around sub-saharan Africa and I don't remember ever being constantly assailed by these offensive smells. After 3 months of observation I have come to the following three conculsions:

1. People just piss everywhere. I've lost count of the amount of people I have seen just stop the scooters and relieve themselves on the side of the road. It's got so bad that the government has set up a committee to address the issue in time for the 2010 Commonwealth games in India.
2. The sewage system is inadequate and many roads do not even have drains (apparently the monsoon season is complete carnage). As a result, waste and water oftens stagnates in culverts and canals and does not get washed away.
3. For many residents in Delhi there are little to no facilities. In many of the slums there will be one running tap and no ablution facilities. As a result slum dwellers are forced to use the railway areas (to which the slums are almost inevitably adjacent) as their toilets. Coming into Delhi on an overnight train the surrounding area is almost crowded with people doing their morning ablutions.

Scary but true.