Garbage-strewn colonies. Tobacco-stained walls. An overflowing sewage system.
Visit just about any major Indian city today and you’re more than likely to catch a glimpse of these unsavoury sights. It’s a far cry from the India that Prime Minister Narendra Modi intended when he set an ambitious goal a year ago. In October 2014, Modi launched the Clean India Campaign — a $40 billion project aiming to make public places “filth-free” by 2019.
The initiative strongly focuses on India’s waste management system, especially since more than half of the country’s population reportedly does not have a toilet at home. As a result, hundreds of millions of people are left with little choice but to defecate in plain sight — by open drains or dry pit latrines. These human waste sites are subsequently cleaned manually by 1.2 million people — some of the country’s poorest and lowest in the caste system.
The federal government’s target is to ensure that every impoverished household and school is equipped with more hygienic facilities. The central and state governments have pledged $20 billion solely toward the construction of toilets, and eight million toilets have already been built.
A man bathes in one of India's many garbage-strewn locales. Millions of the country's lowest caste members often work in these conditions, manually cleaning the latrine pits that plague the nation.
Photo Credit: Associated Press
Although some people heralded the initiative as an important step in raising public awareness about the sanitation crisis, critics say that the campaign has already failed on many fronts and that more work needs to be done on the ground.
“We need municipal reforms, we need greater accountability in municipality, and that is where the solution is,” says Vimlendu Jha to Channel NewsAsia. Jha is the executive director of the non-profit Swechha.
Moreover, the campaign has dealt with its fair share of setbacks. Poor sanitation is believed to have contributed to the worst dengue outbreak that India has seen in years. The nation’s capital, Delhi, reported an estimated 6,000 people affected by the mosquito-borne virus.
In addition to scrubbing India’s infrastructure clean from the residual tobacco stains and litter, the bigger challenge is tackling the cleanliness issue at the systemic level — changing people’s attitudes around pollution and fostering a sense of civic pride.
“The solution is not when we create ads around [Clean India],” says Jha. “That will create a buzz, but real cleaning will happen when people who are supposed to be cleaning it, that is the government, that is actually the municipality, actually gear into action.”
With but four years remaining in the project’s timeline, there’s still much work to do — not only in cleaning the streets of India but also in changing its image as one of the world’s dirtiest nations.
To learn more about the Clean India Campaign, visit www.cleanindia.org.
Main Image Photo Credit: European Pressphoto Agency
Abbas Somji
Author
Abbas Somji is a broadcast journalist and producer, and has worked for media outlets across the country, including the CBC and Omni Television. A Toronto native with a background in delivering the hard news, he enjoys covering stories on pop culture & entertainment. Twitter: @abbassomji
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