I got a letter from Prime Minister Modi the other day.
Invoking Mahatma Gandhi, Mr. Modi wants to clean up India and he wants our help. Mission Swachh Bharat aspires to realize Gandhiji’s dream of a clean India by the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary in 2019, through ‘jan bhagidari’ (people’s participation).
I urge every one of you to devote at least hundred hours every year, that is two hours every week towards cleanliness. We can’t let India remain unclean any longer. On 2nd October I myself will set out with a broom and contribute towards this pious task. . . .Today, I appeal to everyone, particularly political and religious leadership, mayors, sarpanchs [head of the group of village decision makers] and captains of industry to plan and wholeheartedly engage in the task of cleaning your homes, work places, villages, cities and surroundings.
Linking cleanliness to tourism and global interest in India, Modi says that “world class levels of hygiene and cleanliness [are] required in India’s top 50 tourist destinations to bring about a paradigm shift in global perception.” He also articulates a vision of solid waste and wastewater management through public-private partnerships in 500 towns and cities across the country.
Mr. Modi’s project is noble and necessary, but I think he’s going to need more than a (symbolic) broom. Here are a few sobering facts:
- Half of India’s population, or at least 620 million people, defecate outdoors.
- Recent findings by the World Health Organization indicate that the four cities with the worst air pollution readings in the world are Delhi, Patna, Gwalior and Raipur. Delhi’s pollution is almost three times that of Beijing.
- No Indian city has a comprehensive sewage treatment system, and most Indian rivers are open sewers as a result.
- Between 300,000 to 400,000 people die of indoor air pollution and carbon monoxide poisoning in India because of biomass burning and use of inefficient cookstoves.
- Stunting caused by poor sanitation affects 65 million Indian children under the age of 5, including a third of children from the country’s richest families. Ramanan Laxminarayan, vice president for research and policy at the Public Health Foundation of India says, “India’s stunting problem represents the largest loss of human potential in any country in history, and it affects 20 times more people in India alone than H.I.V./AIDS does around the world.”
- In the next decade, urban India will generate some 920 million tons of municipal solid waste, which will threaten further deterioration of public health, air, water and land resources, and the quality of life in Indian cities.
Cleanliness doesn’t just mean litter, it encompasses indoor and ambient air pollution, sewage, water, noise, odors and visual blight. I will discuss these subjects in future blogs, but I want to begin with litter, one of the more unusual features of modern India. Litter is endemic and people toss trash to the ground without a second thought. With a population of around 1.27 billion, that’s a lot of gum wrappers and scraps of paper dropped wherever a person happens to be standing.
Empty lot / landfill site. Notice the discarded toilet.
How this behavioral norm evolved is anyone’s guess. Certainly there is a general absence of public trash receptacles (other than large open bins), but there is a puzzling (to foreigners at least) lack of any apparent sense of personal or collective transgression in the act of littering. And I’m not talking about breaking whatever laws might be on the books in India about littering. It is a reflexive and unconscious behavior, provoking no shame, embarrassment or guilt at the contamination of public space.
Empty bin
Another empty bin.
In the West, the message that littering is “bad” is fixed at childhood, taught in the home and schools, on children’s educational television programs, and public service announcements. It’s not framed as a legal issue, but rather an issue of polluting the shared landscape (despoiling the commons), as well as imposing a burden on others for something that we, as individuals, are responsible for. As your mother would say, “It’s your mess, you clean it up!” or, “What do you think this is, a pig sty?”
There are obvious limits to how deeply such a sense of personal responsibility taught to children continues into adulthood—e.g., CEOs avoiding corporate responsibility for water or air pollution—but laws and informal citizen activism can have a powerful effect on public awareness, attitudes and behaviors. Dog waste and cigarette smoke are good examples.
Dog waste is a widespread pollutant and a serious health issue. The average dog produces almost 275 pounds of waste each year. A single gram of dog waste can contain 23 million fecal coliform bacteria, which are known to cause cramps, diarrhea, intestinal illness, and serious kidney disorders in humans. Disease from dog waste can spread to other dogs, children and adults.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deemed pet waste a “nonpoint source of pollution” in 1991, and today it is the law nationwide (with few exceptions) that dog owners must clean up after their pets. Fines ranging from $20 to $10,000 are commonplace coast to coast in every state, city and township. But average citizens are the de facto enforcers of the law, haranguing and berating negligent pet owners to clean up after their animals. Ad hoc public pressure from irate individuals has worked miracles to help train pet owners to scoop the poop.
So too with second-hand cigarette smoke, the deadly pollutant once inflicted on nonsmokers in workplaces, planes and trains, restaurants and bars, sporting events and other public outdoor areas. As you know, second-hand smoke causes the same problems as direct smoking, including lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and lung ailments such as emphysema, bronchitis, and asthma. Citizen pressure has helped create and ensure implementation of smoking bans and restrictions—Chandigarh became the first smoke-free city-state of India in July 2007, and the country banned smoking in public places in 2008—which in turn support an environment where smoking becomes increasingly more difficult and nudge social norms away from the acceptance of smoking in everyday life.
Can similar shifts in attitude and behavior happen in India with regard to litter, followed by animal waste, and eventually to public urination and defecation? I don’t think there is a choice. Evidence-based public health advocacy and enlightened self-interest demand that Indians confront the enormous disconnect between their private cleanliness and fastidiousness, and their daily acceptance of a smelly, unsightly, unsanitary and unhealthy public realm.
Our Man in Madras 