Modi asks India to clean up

Not since Mahatma Gandhi, the revered independence campaigner, has any Indian leader appeared particularly concerned about the pervasive filth that seems an inevitable part of so many India's public spaces. Until now.

On Thursday - a national holiday to mark Gandhi's birth anniversary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a broom in his hands and swept the road of a working class neighbourhood inhabited by low-caste municipal sweepers, as he launched the Clean India campaign, a drive to create a 'clean India' in five years.

"Is cleaning only the responsibility of the sweepers,' Mr Modi asked afterwards in a rousing address to thousands of central government employees and other invited guests at India Gate. "Do citizens have no role here? We have to change this mindset."

"We reached Mars. No prime minister or minister did it - it was the citizens, the scientists who did it," said the prime minister, who was joined on stage by the popular Bollywood star Aamir Khan. "So can't we create a Clean India?"

India has profound sanitation challenges. According to the 2011 census, nearly 70 per cent of rural households do not have access toilets, which families to defecate in the open, often in or near fields growing produce.

The prevalence of diseases caused by faecal matter in food and water has been increasingly identified as one of the main likely causes of the malnutrition that remains pervasive among rural children, in spite of rising rural incomes.

It is not just a lack of toilets, however. Industries spew untreated waste water into the nation's rivers, while well-to-do urban Indians blithely throw litter out of the windows of moving cars, and leave vast quantities of litter scattered in the grass at parks after festive picnics.

During his election campaign, Mr Modi, who worked hard to promote himself as an economic moderniser rather than the hardline Hindu nationalist ideologue many believe he is, had vowed to put "toilets before temples".

Mr Modi's Clean India campaign appears to have two targets: to alter the deep-rooted Indian mindset in which "cleaning up" tends to be viewed as somebody else's responsibility - a legacy of the Hindu caste system, when tasks such as cleaning toilets, were seen as ritually polluting activities to be done only by low-caste workers already deemed "untouchable".

Though it was a national holiday, more than 3m government employees workers took a "cleanliness pledge", vowing to "neither litter nor let others litter" while students were required to come to their schools for two hours of cleaning. In the run up to the campaign, New Delhi's newspapers have been running ads urging men not to urinate in public.

In an apparent spin off of the "ice bucket challenge" that has gone viral on social media to raise money for charity, Mr Modi publicly invited nine high profile individuals - including several Bollywood stars, the Congress politician Shashi Tharoor and the tycoon Anil Ambani - to personally clean a public place, and invite nine of their friends to do something similar.

But the campaign aims to go beyond merely changing mindsets, and raising public awareness about the need to contribute to a cleaner environment. It also aims at creating more infrastructure for cleanliness and hygiene - including building millions of urban and rural toilets, with participating of major industry groups.

© The Financial Times Limited 2014. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation