Private cleanliness amid public squalor

To succeed, the Prime Minister’s ‘Swachh Bharat’ initiative needs a local civic dimension, wherein cities create their own plans within the larger framework of the mission. Without it, the programme will remain nothing but a grand political scheme

After my sister’s death some years ago, I had carried her ashes for immersion in the Kosi river, an insignificant mountain tributary of the Ganga. I wanted an unsullied bit of water for a religious ceremony, and so chose a secluded stretch of the river in Uttarakhand near Ranikhet. But despite the remoteness, the water and its sand bed was littered with plastic, toothpaste tubes and instant noodle packets. And as the ceremony progressed, I noticed upstream from us a group of men defecating and chatting on the river rocks.

It is no secret that India has the largest number of people defecating in the open, even when a toilet is available. Whether a rivulet along a sloped hillside in a pristine Himalayan valley, a river coursing through a city, or indeed along a coastal beach, water is as much an invitation to drink as it is to excrement. Even the Ganga functions at two levels: as religious sanctuary and India’s largest open air sewer.

Behind ‘Clean India’

Wherever you go — in city or countryside — plastic bags, tetra paks and tin cans mar the landscape. In slum areas and industrial townships, rivulets of slime snake along mud tenements. In cities, garbage overwhelms all sightlines (I recently saw a group of Japanese tourists photographing ragpickers foraging in raw sewage, next to the monument they had come to see). Just as the Mughals had decorated gateways around their settlements, entrances to Indian towns today are rife with a new 21st century sign of welcome: mountains of trash. As humans, pigs and vultures battle among the waste, there hangs over most places, a perpetual stench of decay and death.

For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Clean India” campaign, a Rs.2 lakh crore expenditure is envisaged by the government to clean the country by October 2, 2019, a date to be celebrated as the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Part of the money is intended for drinking water and sanitation programmes and the rest for the physical clean up of Indian cities. But, so acute is the problem of waste, it is hard to believe that the mission can be anything more than a symbolic act.

Moreover, the Indian public has infinite tolerance for hackneyed political gestures — planting saplings, visiting Rajghat, laying foundation stones, conducting pujas for newly built flyovers. “Swachh Bharat” too, say critics, will only remain afloat in the big cities, till such time as the Prime Minister’s greater interest in business matters relegates it to the dung heap. The project’s farcical dimension can already be seen in the surprise inspections of government offices, and the large quantum of brooms and dustbins ordered by bureaucrats and ministers, some departments going into direct competition with each other by issuing instruction handbooks on cleanliness.

Liveability index

That the Prime Minister of a country needs to intervene on an issue as basic as public health is of course the first serious admission that the problem is way out of hand. On the world stage, India is already acknowledged as one of the dirtiest and least liveable countries in the world. In a recent survey of the liveability index of 150 world cities, Delhi, Mumbai and other Indian metros were all listed below 130, only ahead of some West African cities. (Ironically, the same survey listed Delhi as the most desirable city among the Indian low performers.) Chief among the criterion of liveability was health and sanitation, though other related conditions such as infrastructure, parks and accessibility were also spelled out.

Attitude to public life

Indian cities took a beating on the most rudimentary aspects of survival, and were classified more as unplanned spontaneous slums than functioning towns, with some of the highest recorded levels of toxic waste, and consequently, physical sickness. Incidents of asthma and lung infection linked directly to pollution were steadily on the rise. In most metros it was stated as 12 times the national average, and almost a third of the population suffered some form of respiratory illness; the survey also gave damning figures on waterborne diseases, and reduced eyesight, impaired mental acuity and shorter lifespans.

In most countries, public health and sanitation are taken for granted and fall squarely on urban administration. So basic are norms of healthy urban living around the world, they rarely ever make it as news items. Only in India do routine municipal issues assume national importance. Blocked drains during monsoons, road repair, malarial and dengue outbreaks, raw sewage on sidewalks, children stuck in wells, open manholes, fallen trees and collapsing buildings are all signs of a disintegrating collective life. When municipal authorities fail to oversee ordinary maintenance and are incapable of undertaking decisions on day-to-day governance, the city becomes a nightmare of incompetence and failed ideas, regressing quickly into anarchy — a battleground so scarred that the rich can only isolate themselves into private compounds, creating their own insular lives unrelated to the city; the poor are left to their own devices, living in the ruin and seeking business opportunity in the squalor and clutter. The Prime Minister’s cleanliness campaign is merely the fallout of complete municipal collapse.

While credit is certainly due to Mr. Modi for initiating the much needed push to make the country a physically healthier place, the larger thrust of the nationwide mission needs to take into account other ideas that indirectly contribute to civic grime. Cars physically choke city space, parking on sidewalks, covering up and clogging drainage systems; building materials for private construction are allowed to pile up on roads, parks are shuttered, security threatened. Cleanliness is only a small fraction of the larger aspect of urban liveability; if the Prime Minister’s mission is to succeed it must tackle the dangers of increasing urban densities, issues of public safety, misuse of public land for private use, encroachments, aspects of public transport and limits to car ownership, the removal of gated communities; and most of all, the Indian attitude to public life itself: the perpetuation of private cleanliness amid public squalor.

Individual routes to cleanliness

The campaign therefore must endorse a larger movement to improving the quality of life. If that requires serious imposition of urban limits and restrictions, so be it. Around the world, municipalities have created innovative ways to tackle their very local situations — Bangkok with waste management, Kampala with urban farming, London with congestion tax, Madrid and Barcelona with controlled pedestrianisation, Copenhagen with cycling tracks, Singapore with prohibitive litter fines. Within all these individual methods however, every city accepts the ideals on people’s safety, active public life, social tolerance, environmental friendliness, proximity to nature, affordable education and medical care and encouraging business opportunities.

Should Indian cities then similarly discover their own individual routes to cleanliness and hygiene, the way Surat did some years ago? To reduce congestion, should Delhi tax cars parked on public roads at night, or as compensation, offer them as night shelter for the homeless? Should Chennai and Mumbai residents be fined for commuting long distances and adding to pollution? Indeed should citizens who own no vehicles be allowed to travel free on public transport? What then of private homes and offices that have a larger than average carbon footprint; should the affluent directly subsidise housing for the poor? The answers may lead to an altogether new form for the Indian city.

Obviously, to succeed, the Prime Minister’s initiative needs a local civic dimension, wherein cities create their own plans within the larger framework of the “Swachh” mission. Without it, the farce may become all-out satire: bureaucrats will continue to sweep their own offices with requisitioned brooms, and “Clean India” will remain nothing but a grand political scheme.