India may be famous for many things, but the cleanliness of public places is not one among them. In 1927, a white supremacist and racist, Katherine Mayo, wrote a polemical book named Mother India and spewed her prejudice and racial hatred through her book, which Mahatma Gandhi termed as a drain inspector’s report. Though the book is a typical white liberal gaze on lesser creatures of darker skin colour, many things she wrote about the cleanliness of Indians remain true even after a century. Social media is awash with plenty of whites trying to make quick money out of reels that focus on filthy India. They can’t be blamed as Indians get outraged easily at the truth and have a thin skin for criticism, but have no qualms in keeping the country as one open garbage pit. The result is that India has the reputation of being the filthiest country in the world, with only our neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh giving a stiff competition.
The Swachh Bharat Mission was launched with much fanfare in 2014. At that time, it was reported that only 40 per cent of Indian homes had toilets, and 60 per cent practised open defecation. There were huge regional variations in this data, and the laggard states of the Gangetic belt had almost 80 per cent open defecation in the rural areas. The campaign aimed to make India open defecation-free by 2019. Celebrities were roped in, and thousands of crores were spent on building toilets, printing flex hoardings of smiling netas and advertising slogans about cleanliness.
Along with the same, many other programmes were launched, such as cleaning up rivers, rehabilitating the sewage systems and drainage of Indian cities, waste management, etc. The schemes have bombastic names like Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, National Clean Air Programme, etc. We also planned to have 100 smart cities with 24x7 drinking water, zero garbage disposal, total solid waste management with full-scale drainage and sewage systems. An astronomical amount of tax money has been pumped into all these programmes.
On October 2, 2019, India was declared Open Defecation Free on paper. The reality is another story. No one can deny that around 11.5 crore individual household toilets were built under the Swachh Bharat Mission. This is a remarkable achievement of a government scheme. However, the national health survey of 2021 showed 19 per cent of the population still didn’t have access to a toilet, and 20 per cent of Indians relieve themselves in the open. Many of these toilets are now not used for the intended purpose. There are cultural taboos that stop people from cleaning their bathrooms, and they stop using them once they become too unclean to use. Manual scavenging still claims many lives, and this profession is linked to the caste status. No point for guessing which caste people die in manual scavenging accidents.
Without increasing literacy, encouraging social changes, and diluting the grip of caste, the socially backward regions of India are never going to change their age-old practices. In other words, without addressing the question of social progress, schemes that merely pump money into campaigns and PR exercises are bound to result in spectacular failures like this. The failure of the Swachh Bharat Mission is not just restricted to rural areas. Look around your city and see how it has fared in this smart city era.
Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Bangaluru, Pune—you name any big city in India, and we can find broken pavements, garbage mountains in the landfills, open drains that spill into the gutter-filled roads, and everything that you were used to before the Swachh Bharat age. A small shower is enough to make your city look like the Venice of the Sewer. Delhi possesses a trio of artificial trash hills. Here is your smart capital city of the world’s fourth-largest economy. It has three mountains of this garbage that are visually offensive, emit foul odours, and pose serious threats to health and the environment. Other smart cities aren’t far behind. We are sinking into mountains of filth with dysfunctional, corrupt local bodies. We are forced to breathe the foulest air in the world. Our rivers are grand sewage carriers; the holier they are, the dirtier they tend to be. No wonder unemployed white-skinned modern-day Katherine Mayos have turned filming India’s squalor into a novel fast-money enterprise.
It has been 11 years since the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan started. Isn’t it time to openly discuss the scheme’s success and failure? Isn’t it time that parliamentary time is used to debate this serious issue instead of the usual political antics and theatre by politicians on all sides? Where are our 100 smart cities? Where are the clean cities and Swachh India that were promised? If we continue to breathe the most poisonous air, if we are still forced to buy air purifiers to breathe, if we have to have water filters to purify the tap water, if we can’t step outside without stepping on the overflowing garbage, if the smallest rain can make our roads into sewage rivers, where has our tax money vanished? Why are our holy rivers still dirty? Why are there mountains of garbage in our cities? If Katherine Mayo returns today, she would be delighted that there is no need to edit or correct her infamous book. We deserve every name she called and worse. It is time we held the political and civil authorities and ourselves responsible.