Change at last?

IN THE 30 years that this column has existed, I have made a sincere attempt in the first column of a new year to write about good news. This time the Prime Minister’s determination to drag India kicking, screaming and queuing into the digital age has made this quite hard. A surreal quality has snuck into our lives. We see the Prime Minister give rousing speeches in poll-bound states about our phones and thumbs replacing banks and currency. And on the same day newspaper front pages report mass molestation of young women in our most digital city. Add to this our daily dose of rape, brutality and stories of girls from Adivasi backwaters sold into slavery in India’s capital, and it is difficult to come up with good cheer.

So it made me happy when a high official from the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation asked if we could meet so that he could correct my impressions of the Swachh Bharat undertaking. In last week’s column I said that it seemed to be mostly just a good idea, and this is what inspired the high official to invite me for a chat. He began by telling me that the Prime Minister’s heart was so much in this programme that he personally oversaw its progress. He said I was wrong to believe nothing had been achieved. According to him, in the past year, the number of villages where defecating in public has been stopped has gone up from 20,000 to around 1,40,000.

This is no small achievement considering the size of the problem. As Vidia Naipaul once cruelly pointed out, ‘Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover’. He wrote these words more than 50 years ago in An Area of Darkness, and because those were Nehruvian days, public opinion was leftist, hypersensitive and chippy. So instead of addressing the problem, the general reaction of Indian ‘intellectuals’ was to revile Naipaul. As someone who believes that open defecation is directly responsible for the stunting and untimely deaths of millions of Indian children, I have railed against it long before Narendra Modi made it a national mission.

So it pleased me to hear from the high official that rural sanitation is being treated with urgency and by using digital mapping to identify the progress state governments are making. The worst offenders show up red on the map and they are Bihar and Odisha. In the rest of the country there are signs of hope and changing habits. The government of India is making tireless efforts to support those states who are doing well. Also underway is a programme to pay extra attention to villages and towns on the Ganga so that this helps purify our most defiled and most sacred river.

At this point I reminded the high official that Benaras continues to be disgracefully filthy and he agreed sheepishly that ‘more needs to be done’. He added, though, that one of the new efforts being made by his ministry is a special programme for 100 ‘iconic’ pilgrim towns. Travellers to Amritsar report that the Golden Temple now glistens in hugely transformed environs. The smelly bazaars with their open drains and hovel-like shops have disappeared, or at least do not show up in the advertising blitzkrieg that the Punjab government has launched on television. If the Prime Minister can inspire Indians to make sanitation and public hygiene their own mission, it could end up solving more than 80 per cent of our health problems.

The road ahead is filled with obstacles and the usual political and bureaucratic roadblocks. On top of this there are ancient cultural and caste taboos to break through and the tendency of most leftist political parties to excuse our filthy habits on poverty. So the task really is monumental, but if Modi succeeds in really cleaning up India, it could be his most important legacy.

More importantly, it is not possible to reconcile India in her present state with the digital dreamland Modi promises to lead us to. As this newspaper reported last week on its front page, officials charged with making India digital are already up to all sorts of tricks. So the district collector of Malappuram in Kerala declared Nedumkayam as India’s ‘first cashless tribal village’ by transferring Rs 5 digitally into the accounts of 27 people. This was technically enabled by providing Wifi facilities that later turned out to be ephemeral. This ‘digital’ dream village has neither water nor toilets. This is true of many of our 6,00,000 villages, so making Swachh Bharat a reality is a huge challenge. But it is good news that someone up there is trying.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh