The new found penchant for cleanliness awareness in India has made me light-headed. The leader who has vouched ‘sweeping’ reforms quiet literally nominates celebrities in a fashion that resembles the ice bucket challenge. What you see next is the celebrities adorned in their Sunday bests flashing brand new brooms. Netas go to the extent of dumping waste before they can sweep it away for the photo op. Soon a sweeping selfie using the broom as the selfie stick would be the most in thing to post on social networks. A cricketing celebrity poses with it as though he is all set to execute his trade mark cover drive, a lady minister who is responsible for the resources presently and who is not so new to the art of posing poses like a devote daughter in law all set to impress her mother in law on her first day. This comparison might be archaic in today’s world, don’t bother about the relevance; I want you to focus only on the symbolism here. Since the image of a woman with a broom in hand could symbolise more than one interpretation, witch, (oops looks like the spell check did not do an auto correct) which, could also mean a damsel out to clean the society of all evils.
A clean India is every Indians dream from time immemorial. Having lived outside the country for close to 2 decades, it has been my dream too till date. We don’t need symbolisms; the need of the hour is a paradigm shift in civic sense. I grew up cycling or walking past streets in Madras following an olfactory GPS, though I have elucidated the olfactory enabled GPS in a positive way in an earlier post on Madras, I am forced to write on the negative side of the very same olfactory GPS in this post. The characteristic smell of Madras as we cross the Cooum river, once a navigable source is today an open drain. I was also a laughing stock of my cousins from Kerala who used to tell me that the sight of squatting men lining up the tracks leading to the Madras Central would remind them both visually and olfactorily of reaching the city. However over the years the so called clean Kerala was closing in on Madras with poor waste management and overflowing waste bins due to bad waste management. The sad part was that even in an Oscar winning movie, the poor state of sanitation in India played a key part. Remember the toilet scene in Jai Ho! What a pity? Cleanliness is next to Godliness goes the saying. However the recent emphasis on cleaning the Ganga is more out of Godliness than cleanliness, out of fear of the super natural.
As I said earlier we cannot win this war on cleanliness by just symbolisms and other media gimmicks but by a committed population that is willing to change, change should be from within and there needs to be an entire clean culture revolution that needs to happen, it might not happen during a 5 year term or even the next 5 year term of the leadership which believes in sweeping reforms overnight but will definitely happen if we educate the present 1 year olds and set examples that they can follow. So it might take at least a couple decades before we see a clean India. Unfortunately the leadership would be interested only in stuff that they can take credit for during their term. That’s exactly the reason why cleanliness drive across different governments has not gone beyond acts of symbolisms.
What we need is not just cultural revolutions and symbolic blitzkriegs but a substantial investment in infrastructure particularly in sanitation, all we need to do is that for the next 10 Years CSR initiatives of private sector should be restricted only to sanitation related projects. A toilet connected to the drainage system will hardly cost anything to the corporates. A dustbin revolution, source segregation and proper disposal of waste all are the need of the hour.
The celebrities endorsing the Swach Bharat campaign who are busy attending their call of nature in designer glamour rooms lined with Italian granite and have their dirt washed down with the best of German fittings have no clue on what it takes to stand in a queue to empty ones bowels and bladders.
Trumpeting with slogans like Saif for Safai or Sachin for Swach is not enough to dream about or create a clean India. What we need is an infrastructure revolution that can facilitate adoption of cleanliness by the common man.
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