Let’s clean up our act, guys!

Swachh Bharat has made a difference but much more needs to be done

Alok Tiwari

It is that time of the year when the Central government gives away awards for achievers in India’s cleanliness drive. This time the honours have gone to Ahmedabad and Uttar Pradesh as the cleanest large city and cleanest state respectively. Haters might see political undertones to the results, especially since Bengaluru has been named among the dirtiest cities. It is possible politics may have affected the outcomes somewhat but let us not go there.

Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) is one initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that can be unequivocally supported by all. Sanitation and hygiene have been traditionally neglected in India. Our cities and villages have been and still are monuments of dirtiness. It is a matter of immense shame that decades after Independence, a prime minister has to tell the citizens not to pee and poop in public. This when we boast of being among the oldest civilizations. We take immense pride in our heritage, a pride that has grown to stratospheric heights in recent years, but our behaviour remains shameful. Indians tend to earn a bad name everywhere in the world for their tendency not to maintain personal and public hygiene.

It is one area where the governments have been less responsible than the people. People in India do not behave even when physical infrastructure is made available for proper disposal of waste. It is not uncommon to see customers at eateries spread waste all around though garbage bins are available. One can see passengers throwing away banana peels, wrappers, and even diapers on the street from luxury cars. Such waste can be seen along our railway tracks and poshest expressways for thousands of kilometres. Public toilets remain somewhat usable only if they are manned. You cannot go within 10 metres of unattended ones because of the stench. This one is on us, folks, not on the government.

That said, it is not that authorities are blameless. There are systemic problems that have prevented our cities and villages from doing much, not just in sanitation and hygiene, but in every area. Garbage disposal is responsibility of local self-governments. In India this means municipal corporations and councils for cities and gram panchayats for villages. This has always been the weakest tier of the government in terms of political and financial powers. State governments have played fast and loose with local bodies for years.

In Maharashtra, supposedly one of the most progressive states, local body elections have been pushed back years because they were inconvenient for the party in power. Not just that, constituencies have been played and experimented with to ensure favourable outcomes. The powers of local taxation have been eroded to the point of nothingness. This is the story nationally, more or less. So, even if local leaders wish to take some steps towards better sanitation, they find themselves without power and money to do so. The proof lies in the fact that a national mission had to be launched for what is essentially local bodies’ work.

Has the SBM made any difference? Answer is yes and no. In larger cities there is visible difference in some areas. Direct collection of garbage from homes, now a reality in most big cities, has eliminated garbage heaps that used to be hallmark of Indian urban landscape. In many places, this has led to reduction in disease vectors like houseflies. Though the initiative itself may be older, SBM provided the push and funds needed to expand and normalize the practice. Swachh surveys and ranking system introduced under the mission made the cities look at areas like proper disposal of solid waste and sewage treatment, provision of working public toilets, and taking steps to end open defecation. Any initiative in these areas helps politicians earn boasting rights. They have begun providing money to these areas that were neglected.

It has also raised public awareness. Publication of surveys makes headlines in every city. Local leaders are under scanner if the city slides in rankings and there is rush for credit if it rises. Civic leaders are required to explain the bad performance. Areas where the city lost points are highlighted. Hopefully, this will lead to betterment in subsequent years. Yet, it remains a huge work in progress. While garbage dumps may have disappeared from streets, landfill sites are another matter. There is hardly any city that processes its garbage in any meaningful manner, including the ones earning top rankings in surveys. Mountains of rubbish surround every large city and them catching fire frequently cause high polluting events.

Same is the case with sewage disposal. Every city has turned streams and rivers running through it into drains that are a source of disease and ground pollution by pouring untreated sewage into them. Hundreds of crores have been spent and are being spent on river revival programmes without much to show for it. These programmes are either inadequate or plagued by delays and corruption or both. Cities all over the world pride themselves on rivers they are built along. Their banks provide serenity and beauty. In India, where rivers are worshipped as goddesses, they have been turned into carriers of human waste. Mosquitoes remain a huge problem as do diseases like malaria and dengue spread by them.

Understandably, addressing these is a big task. It is also capital-intensive and it would be unreasonable to expect transformation in a short time. It must also be said that the approach to solving problems needs to be modified. It is still very much top down. With funding coming from Centre, it gets to decide the priorities. The SBM does not do anything to remove the systemic defects that have resulted in neglect of sanitation. There is a danger that things may slide back once the mission stops. For cleanliness to be permanent across India, local bodies need to be strengthened and given autonomy as well as accountability.