Which citizen of the country would not like a cleaner India? It is with the noblest of intentions that schemes like the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan and its successor, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, were floated. The corpus of the latter has been boosted by a cess to be collected from virtually every citizen of the country who uses a telephone, eats out at restaurants or travels by train.
This should bring an additional estimated Rs 3,800 crore in the remainder of the financial year and '10,000 crore in a full year. The total funds available under the scheme are a whopping Rs 62,000 crore. What we would like to know now is whether the scheme is working. Is India a cleaner place? We must provide the answers to every Indian as he is one of the most (indirectly) taxed citizens of the world.
The Swachh Bharat campaign, covering over 4,000 towns, was floated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary in 2014 with the aim of providing clean streets, roads and urban infrastructure besides meeting rural sanitation targets. It is supposed to fructify by October 2, 2019, by when the country should be free of open defecation, etc.
Ultra-ambitious as the scheme is in going beyond Nirmal’s rural focus by embracing cities and towns, it is a moot point whether Swachh has gone above providing photo opportunities for politicians stepping broom in hand into the streets in front of cameras, and also for the several celebrities they brought on board to impel the movement.
It was an impressive enough start with over three million people, including school and college students, joining a movement spurred by Gandhi’s words and the larger ineluctable truth of cleanliness being next only to godliness.
While Malthus’ theories about the tendency of populations to exceed resources have always been bang on target, what remains to be seen is whether Swachh Bharat can deliver its promises of a cleaner and healthier environment for an expanding population. Questions, however, remain about how a Central scheme can drive strictly municipal work.
It is as yet unclear how the scheme has impacted life in general. While the noble ideals of building 12 crore toilets have yet to translate into action to benefit the large rural population and school students, a point to ponder is how is Swachh Bharat going to benefit each one who is already paying a very high tax towards this. Will the government educate the public on the need for cleanliness and, while doing so, also inform the public about how these funds have been deployed and how they will be used in the future? The scheme’s opaqueness is matched only by the civic mess that very large parts of India are.
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