Chetan Bhagat
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the first signs of a well managed place — whether it is a restaurant, hotel, airport, office or train station — is its level of cleanliness. If the place isn’t clean, it is unlikely to impress anyone. The same applies to an entire country. Indians who travel abroad are often awestruck by cleanliness levels in the developed world.
Therefore, if we want our country to realise its full potential in the world, we have to make it clean. A land of filth, no matter how talented its people and how wonderful its natural resources, will never earn the respect it deserves.
Perhaps this is a reason why the PM has taken on the Swachh Bharat mission with such gusto. Not only him, several other influencers and prominent people have lent a hand to the cause, often holding a broom along with it.However, while the broom in hand does make a compelling photo-op and is well intentioned, it will take a lot more to clean India. If we are really serious about this, let us first figure out why we are dirty in the first place, and what it would take to have a cleaner India.
We are not dirty people. Indians keep their homes scrupulously clean. In many parts of India people do not wear shoes inside the house to keep interiors clean. Some of our religious places are kept clean (though there are exceptions, don’t even get me started on Varanasi and Mathura). Diwali, our biggest festival, is the time to spring clean. Indians are meticulous about taking a shower daily, which may not be as common in the West.
So why is our country dirty? Why is it when we step out of our homes, we will find the roadside littered? Is it the municipal corporation that isn’t doing its job? Is it the local politician who should ensure things are kept clean? Do we not have enough dustbins?
None of the above issues fully explain why India is unclean. The reason is that we make it dirty in the first place. And if we want truly to be a clean country we need to take steps to ensure we minimise filth in the first place, rather than hoping someone will pick up the broom and clean it. Developed countries in Western Europe and North America do not have local authorities sweeping the streets all the time. They have systems in place, and the local population cooperates to not create filth in the first place.
We on the other hand look at our country differently from our homes. Inside our houses, we want things to be spick and span. Outside the entrance door, it doesn’t matter. It isn’t mine. It’s dirty anyway and how does it matter if i dump some more litter on the streets?
With this mentality, you can have an army of municipal corporation workers working 24×7, a hundred celebrities sweeping the streets, the PM making a dozen speeches, i assure you, India will not become clean.
The only way it can and will become clean is if we minimise and prevent creating filth in the first place, and the only way that will happen is when all of us together think ‘what is outside my home is also mine’.
This sense of community, recognition of a greater good and collective ownership is the only way for the situation to change. Else, we risk this cleanliness drive becoming another social fad that will be forgotten when the novelty wears off.
Of course, infrastructure improvements such as new treatment plants for solid, sewage, industrial and agricultural waste are required. New sets of indices, whether they be measures of cleanliness or density of dustbin distribution, are needed too. Laws and fines have their place as well. All that is indeed the government’s job and they will be judged on it.
However, all this will come to naught if we Indians don’t change our mentality about what is my space and what isn’t. The country is yours. You obviously can’t clean all of it, but you can be aware of at least a little bit of area around you. If every Indian has a concept of ‘my 10 metres’, or a sense of ownership about a 10 metre radius around him or her, magic can happen. Ten metres is just 30 feet around you. Given the number of people we have, we can achieve a lot if we all get together.
So it should not just be ‘my home should be clean’, but ‘my home and surrounding 10 metres should be clean’.
Whenever there is a collective sense of ownership, we have higher cleanliness levels. It is for this reason most college campuses are cleaner than the city outside, despite housing thousands of youngsters inside.
So get out there, scan your 10 metres. Can you improve anything? A swachh Bharat is indeed possible. The first step is ‘swachh manasikta’ or clean mindsets. Are you game?
In the interests of full disclosure Prakash Javadekar, Union minister for information and broadcasting as well as for environment and forests, nominated me to help with the Swachh Bharat campaign. This column is one of my contributions towards the campaign. Opinions expressed, however, are independent and personal.
Source: Times of India
