CITYZEN. A serious hurdle to Swachh Bharat

By placing cleanliness high up on his agenda, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has focused attention on a critical problem that is usually — pardon the pun — swept aside.

The initial official pronouncements also promise substantial financial and administrative efforts to ensure a toilet in every home.

Important as these initiatives are, it is difficult to brush aside the feeling that this approach is ignoring an important part of the problem: a major portion of the challenge of cleanliness in Indian cities is not so much about individual attitudes to hygiene, but about their approach to different spaces in the city.

The idea that Indians typically do not care very much about cleanliness is not quite borne out by the conditions inside most homes. Most Indians make an effort to ensure their homes meet what they believe to be minimum standards of cleanliness.

The trouble arises from the fact that they do not have the same commitment to spaces outside their homes.

The distinction urban Indians currently make between these two spaces is deeply influenced by the extent to which they identify with a particular public space.

Typically, urban Indians do less to litter their places of worship than they do their roads. Though it is not explicitly stated, they believe it is their duty to keep their places of worship clean, but this duty does not extend to their roads.

Trying to overcome this divide through campaigns is not without its limitations. While such efforts do attract energetic campaigners, they do not always result in changing attitudes to public spaces.

Asking citizens to spend a hundred hours a year on cleaning public spaces would be useful, but the real challenge is to create everyday public practices that reduce the need for such cleaning.

If citizens stop leaving garbage on the streets the need for them to contribute a certain number of hours to remove it would not arise.

Creating everyday practices that erase the distinction between attitudes to the home and to public spaces, however, comes up against a major barrier in Indian cities.

Individuals cannot easily identify with space outside their homes because that space is usually contested. In most, if not all, Indian cities we do not have clearly defined and widely accepted social norms for the behaviour of an individual in a public space.

There is, perhaps, no better example of the absence of such norms than roads in our cities. It is not unusual in some of the most global of Indian cities to find cars parked on pavements and two-wheelers treating this space as an extension of the road.

Even the simple act of crossing a road can be a contestation. It is quite common for pedestrians to wait in a group till they have sufficient numbers to force vehicles to allow them to cross.

These battles are not played out in the domain of traffic alone. India is one of the few countries in the world where an organisation can take control of all the roads in a city for a specified period of time by calling a bandh.

And these battles can extend well beyond the physical domain, to spaces demarcated by some of our other senses. The space demarcated by our sense of hearing can be contested by loudspeakers. Indeed, loudspeakers are now widely recognised as a common spark in communal riots.

Our sense of taste too can lead to contestations in public spaces, with the push towards vegetarianism in officialdom being contested by some Dalit groups organising beef festivals in academic institutions. In the midst of these widespread contestations it is difficult to get individuals to identify completely with a public space.

Rather than contributing to the social protection of a public space by, say, keeping it clean, the focus is on establishing the right of an individual over that public space.

The establishment of this right could be done on a relatively permanent basis as when a family claims the right to park their car on the road in front of their house, or on more transient terms as refusing to yield when driving.

The right to dump your garbage on the street then becomes more important than the duty to keep it clean. The absence of cleanliness in our public spaces is then only a reflection of the larger malaise of unresolved contestations over these spaces.

It is possible that the oath the Prime Minister would like us to take on keeping India clean will spark a sense of duty in some of us living in our cities.

But it is to be hoped that the part of the oath that requires us to stop others from littering our public spaces will not add another dimension to the already widespread contestations of these spaces in our cities.

The writer is professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore