The clarion call to make India clean could not have been made at a better juncture. The dirt and filth of our cities has reached a nadir. This is less related to economics of underdevelopment than an indication of cultural and social decadence. We just don’t care. Not only slums are dirty. The high priced residential and commercial places in our cities are filthy. Go around any five star hotel, mega malls, multi-plexes and you would know what we are talking about. Just outside or around the opulent complexes and high-rise condominiums, you will find dumbs of garbage.
These places are not being dirtied by the poor who have no access to such ‘sanitised’ unsanitary locations. Nobody but the rich users is to be blamed for filth at such places. In fact, it will be a more difficult task to train the educated and well-to-do people to clean up their act than in dealing with the ordinary mortals living in underdeveloped areas. We must get free from this hugely embarrassing garbagitarian existence, to coin a term.
Katherine Ashenburg, though dealing with personal hygiene in her book, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitised History, observed, “Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious”. This affirmation also explains our general attitude towards the appallingly dirty public spaces all around. What is our take on thisIJ Not in my backyard, is the leitmotif of our culture — my house or shop must be clean — while I put all the dirt outside my door as it is somebody else’s business to clean up.
If a culture cannot learn to live aesthetically, let alone maintain basic hygiene, it should forfeit the right to be called a civilized entity. This seemingly harsh characterization must be admitted if we want to break away from the mucky existence that is presently our lot. We are hundred years behind the developed countries in cleanliness including even those from our neighborhood in East Asia. The indignity of our grimy surroundings, parks, markets, institutions, buildings, streets, nallahs, water bodies, rivers etc. is an eyesore and it hardly affects us.
This situation accentuates the unseemliness in a globalized world. We have to be told to clean up as if the responders are middle school children, not yet adult enough to care for such basic civic duty. The point that is unmistakably to be noted is that no amount of cleaning by civic bodies alone, their general lethargy and inefficiency notwithstanding, would mitigate the present condition or be able to make a dent in our filthy environment, unless the populace at large gets involved in this mission.
Urinating in public places is another scourge. This nauseating practice is seen not because there are no toilets around but because these people have become a ‘slave of their bowels’, in the words of late Khushwant Singh. It defies logic that between a shop/school/office/hospital/ and a house, a person cannot and should not hold his bowel – it is nothing but an unclean frame of mind that allows him to indulge in such sickening activity – oddly even considered by some as a marker of their manliness. We regularly see a man pulling up his bike or car anywhere in the heart of the city and then nonchalantly relieving himself. Cannot he wait to reach his destination and avoid making an ass of himself in full public viewIJ They will not learn unless they are made to bear the cost of their misdemeanor by way of fines. The rider is only for urban workers, especially labour etc. who often do not have access to toilet facility in the immediate neighborhood.
Open defecation is added blot on the face of our country. Brian W. Aldiss in his book, The Dark light Years, observes, “Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta”. A country with nuclear capabilities and being the third nation to have reached Mars without clichés, has failed on this basic front, which is directly related to preserving human dignity. This failure is not for reasons of economics alone, though important enough, but also cultural (social and psychological – many consider this to be an unclean thing to have a toilet in the house) and sadly a matter of weak enforcement.
People who spend mindlessly on family and religious rituals should also be bound to spend on constructing this basic facility in their habitat, even if under duress, with the support of state finance, for the poor. This aspect has not received the needed attention and then we have a very lethargic and corrupt bureaucracy that would not venture out to burden itself with such mundane affairs as to promote making toilets.
The Swacchta Abhiyan in general and construction of toilets in particular is going to be a gigantic task for the central and state governments, involving huge cost and management issues but nonetheless necessary for creating an enabling environment for better compliance. The mission also needs to be supported by massive Information Education Campaign for a mindset change so as to facilitate willing acceptance of the programme.