Of Platitudes & Symbolisms

Like every other observance in this country, Gandhi Jayanti – the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi comes and goes without much impact on the minds and hearts of people. The Swachh Bharat campaign was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2014 with much fanfare with the intent of bringing a modicum of cleanliness in this country where dirt and filth are strewn carelessly everywhere and fecal matter emptied into rivers. The concept of Swachh Bharat is to provide sanitation facilities to every family, including toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems, village cleanliness, and safe and adequate drinking water supply. Modi’s fervent appeal in 2014 was that the above mission was to be achieved by 2019 as a befitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, on his 150th birth anniversary. Its now 2021 but the impact is hardly visible; not in Meghalaya’s capital of Shillong.
Prime Minister Modi had said that the Swachh Bharat mission is beyond politics and should be inspired by patriotism and not politics. He also asked people to pledge ‘na main gandagi karoonga, na main gandagi karne doonga’ (I shall not litter and won’t allow anyone to do so). Modi emphasized that the Swachh Bharat Campaign is not just a slogan, but a civic responsibility. But government-run missions tend to be reduced to symbolic gestures. A travel to the any of the villages will see signboards galore announcing that the village is open defecation free (ODF) as if merely putting up the signboard is enough to engineer behavioral change in people who don’t understand why the idea of open defecation is the worst unhygienic practice. The problem with government run missions is that they are target oriented but don’t look at sustainability. Awareness creation has no time-lime. It’s an ongoing process, in the same manner that education is a life-long process. The message has to be bombarded repeatedly and if people intentionally violate regulations, then a fine is the only way to deal with belligerence.
This year too Gandhi Jayanti saw several groups emerging to clean up localities and even rivers as if a one-day symbolic gesture will keep the rivers and the city itself clean. This is artifice at its worst and the photo-ops and media blitzkrieg on such occasions are intended to mislead. It might give the people involved in such one day gestures a momentary sense of achievement but it does nothing at all for the environment because those involved in the dirtying process are not part of the cleaning up. How to infuse civic responsibility in every citizen should be the goal of Swachh Bharat.