Political Diary

New Delhi, 4 October 2014

Swachh Bharat Translates ….

JADDU-HOLDING SELFIE JAYANTI!

By Poonam I Kaushish

In an age of image makeovers, Gandhi Jayanti got a fresh coat of paint and was rechristened 'Swachh Bharat' movement by Prime Minister Modi who extolled citizens to participate and make it a success. Dubbing the mission beyond politics and inspired by patriotism he swept a pavement and collected garbage. Brave words, indeed, which alas, got reduced to Jaddu-Holding Selfie Jayanti!

Ministers, bureaucrats, Bollywood stars, VVIPs and busybodies hit the dirty ground running by hand-picking areas, read constituencies, to kill two birds with one broom: Earn Modi brownie points and aam aadmi votes, brandishing selfies on Facebook and Twitter. As a sardonic Congress helplessly watched Modi upstage it by inviting its MP among eminent Indians to join Clean India by 2019, Gandhi’s 150^th birth anniversary. 

Undeniably, Modi has enunciated a lofty and admirable idea. That India is filthy needs no reiteration. Open defecation, urinating against walls, spewing paan and tobacco on freshly painted exteriors, dumping garbage outside one’s house, littering public places, strewing rubbish all over, defacing fences with obscenity, stinking, rancid air and pollution  et al.  

An example: Barely had the main function at Delhi’s India Gate finished and Modi, his ministerial brood, babus and other VVIPs trooped out, TV cameras exposed the trash they left behind. Plastic bottles, pamphlets, copies of Modi’s speech, biscuit wrappings etc.

Questionably, is cleaning only the responsibility of sweepers? Don’t we have any role to keep our environs dirt free? Or is it just limited to let the garbage pile up in some one else’s backyard, not my problem. Mind you, it has nothing to do with being rich or poor, living in urban or rural countryside but about hygiene, sanitation, dirt-free and sparkling.

Is Modi’s Mission Clean India doable by 2019? According to a Central Pollution Control Board study urban India generates about 68 million tonnes of solid waste annually, three lakh tonnes every day in cities with a municipal body and 20 million tonnes in another 30% of urban landscape outside cities. While 27 million tonnes is dumped in landfills outside cities, 14 million tonnes is left to rot. Moreover, 48 billion litres of sewage is generated every day by 498 tier-I cities and 26 billion litres dumped into rivers daily.

According to a TERI calculation garbage generated would cover 3.2 lakh football fields piled 9m (27 ft) high with garbage. The Ghazipur landfill on Delhi’s outskirts reached its capacity 10 years ago yet continues to receive trash from Central Government offices and needs 150 acres more, an impossible task no matter the refuse piles skywards.   

More shocking, nearly 65% of our 1.2 billion people lack basic sanitation. According to the 2011 census, 59.1% of urban homes don’t have a toilet, which increases to 80% in rural households. Jharkhand tops the list with 77% of homes having no toilet facilities, 76.6% in Orissa and 75.8% in Bihar. All three are among the poorest States with huge populations that live on less than Rs 50/- a day

Add to this the most degrading widespread practice of 21^st Century, manual scavenging. Over 1% of households in urban and rural areas continue to rely on this practice today. In over 13 lakh toilets, the waste is flushed into open drains and cleaned by humans. Around 25 crore households (12 lakh in rural and 13 lakh in urban areas) have manual scavengers to remove night soil from the toilets and transport human excreta

Scandalously, 21 years after the enacted of The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act on 5 June 1993, the ground reality is that the law is far from being implemented. Instead, the manual scavengers’ number has increased from 5.88 lakhs in 1992 to over 10.87 lakhs, read over 12 lakh, of whom 95 per cent are Dalits who have the task thrust on them as “traditional occupation”.

Worse, this is not something scavengers choose to do but something they're born into --- thanks to being at the very bottom of the caste pyramid. Notwithstanding, cleaning dry toilets and manually removing human waste is a violation of human rights and dignity and a punishable offence, they are treated as outcasts which compounds the practice of untouchability.

Notably, one reason is lack of water. Outrageously in Capital Delhi, a toilet has been converted in to a classroom due to the taps running dry. In Madhya Pradesh the “lal seeti” swachhata doots working on an intensive sanitation drive had got people to build and use toilets but water constraints led them back to the fields to ease themselves.

In Rajasthan four train loads of water are the lifeline for 128 villages and towns These trains fetch 6 million litres from Jodhpur for 4 lakh people in Pali and 10 towns get water once in three days and 31 once in two days. In Andhra Pradesh, only 34 out of 116 municipalities get regular water for an hour twice a week.

All in all, the Prime Minister has made a beginning. How far he will succeed, only time will tell. But it is a long steep uphill economically and socially. Over Rs. 1.34 lakh crores are needed to build 11 crores pucca loos in villages and Rs. 62,000 crores to build 5.1 lakh community and public toilets in urban areas. No budget has been given for toilet maintenance.

Who will fund all this? While the Government will spend Rs.4623 crores on urban toilets, but none is any wiser who will fund rural loos. Babus say the remainder will come from State Governments. Forget it. Haryana’s Sirsa district tells another story.

Under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan programme a Rs.9,100 subsidy to build a toilet in each house was promised, yet most homes are awaiting funds. Why? The programme is designed such that people have to wait to construct their door from one funding source, the seat from another and the rank from a third!

While Rs 4,500 is given from MNREAGA, Rs. 4,600 from NBA, and the family has to show it put in a labour cost of at least Rs. 900. Ironically, there is plenty of water to irrigate the lush opulent one-five-acre bungalows of Ministers and babus where they grow vegetables and even wheat.

Who should one turn for redemption and solace? Modi talks of providing a transparent, responsive and efficient administration. Great. If he is serious, first he has to come to grips with the increasing neta-babu nexus and a practically collapsed administrative system. Whereby, nothing moves without greasing of palms.

Our leaders need to respect human life. To foresee is to govern. Good governance is not an option it is a matter of life and death. If India cannot provide the aam aadmi with adequate resources to meet his basic needs, it will cripple his full participation in the country’s progress.

Simultaneously, there should be a cleanliness cell in every Government office. Citizens too have a duty to maintain parks and rivers. The Ganga takes in more than 2,000 million litres of dirt daily discharged by factories and human waste, accounting for 80% pollutants.

If India really wants to develop, it will have to find ways to back up laws with quality action, not shoddy tokenism, photo ops and selfies. If we want to use our finest resource, we have to start taking our citizens seriously and treating them like worthwhile investments. Follow a ‘womb to tomb’ policy. In the final crunch: Governance cannot be reduced to tokenism. Swatchh Bharat, anyone? ----- INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)