#dnaEdit: Modifying India?

The launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission on Gandhi Jayanti was timed to perfection. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Raj Ghat and then a Valmiki basti in Central Delhi, where safai karamcharis (sanitation workers) reside, heightened the symbolism of the event. Modi has set a five-year target for the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) to ensure a “Clean India” by 2019, to coincide with the celebrations of the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. In his message to the country on September 25, Modi has also asked Indians to “devote at least 100 hours a year, that is two hours every week, towards cleanliness”, without elaborating further. On the bureaucratic side, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation will contribute Rs1.34 lakh crore and handle the SBM’s rural component, while the Urban Development Ministry will contribute Rs62,000 crore for the urban component. In itself, the SBM targets: elimination of open defecation, conversion of insanitary toilets to pour-flush toilets, eradication of manual scavenging, and municipal solid waste management — are hardly novel.

The same targets have progressed under different names like Central Rural Sanitation Programme (until 1999), Total Sanitation Campaign (until 2012), and thereafter the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, but open defecation continues to be widely prevalent. However, the SBM now makes the promise of generating behavioural changes in people regarding sanitation practices, improving awareness on sanitation-public health linkages, and enabling local self-government body and private sector participation. Modi, through his “challenge” to nine celebrities to post videos on their cleaning activities, and urging ministers and bureaucrats to join him on the cleaning drive, expects this to trigger behavioural change and awareness. It is admirable that an Indian Prime Minister has finally seized the initiative on an endemic, yet invisible, evil. But sustaining civil society and bureaucratic enthusiasm will prove challenging, moving forward from October 2. Public memory is short and old habits die hard, to quote two aphorisms. But even if he fails, Modi will have the satisfaction of having made an effort, like Gandhi, to improve personal hygiene.

But what Modi must internalise from Gandhi’s lifelong crusade was the latter’s understanding of how caste dictated Indian sanitary behaviour. In his ashrams and during his travels, Gandhi would castigate his caste Hindu followers who refused to pick up a broom and those ascribing the task of cleaning and scavenging to “sweepers”. The reality of India is that almost all safai karamcharis and every manual scavenger are drawn from Dalit communities at the bottom of the social spectrum. The ready availability of a class of people to do manual public cleaning duties has allowed the rest of us to shirk responsibilities and develop habits like littering, spitting and using dry latrines. Despite laws and judicial orders banning manual scavenging, every monsoon season witnesses the death of men descending into clogged municipal sewers and falling prey to toxic gases. While the many photo-ops by ministers and bureaucrats have sent out a message extolling the virtues of keeping public roads clean and sweeping them, those doing this work on a daily basis have been quietly forgotten. Alongside the coming push to building household and community toilets, the Centre must improve the working conditions of safai karamcharis and rehabilitate manual scavengers. For long, India has relied on landfills as the solution to urban solid waste management. This is unsustainable and self-destructive. The SBM’s urban component, aiming to target all 4,041 statutory towns, will be a non-starter until it offers technological solutions that allow for maximum reuse, recycling and energy recovery.