The sanitation is the work and job of the local bodies, still Mr Modi embarks on the campaign to show how concerned he is about it. Whereas the fact remains that the innumerable plans drawn by the consultants for various cities called the city sanitation plans (CSPs) have been screaming for adequate investments to manage both their solid and liquid waste. Instead of empowering the local bodies with adequate financial assistance by way of decentralised tax collection the government forces them (local bodies) to knock at their (central government) doors through bulky detailed project reports (DPRs) which hardly get financed.
On an average, this business of preparing a DPR for a solid waste management plant or a sewage treatment plant takes several years and by the time the execution starts the demography and geography of the city changes.
The population increases. Take for example, the sewage plan of a small town Leh which was planned in 2010. Since then the population has doubled and the requirement has also changed considerably. Still the execution of the Leh sewage plan has not been completed. It eventually affects the performance of such a utility. This is invariably the case in every city.
What is required is not a centralised euphoric campaign as is exhorted by Mr Modi, rather a more de-centralised work plan for the cities and the villages that caters to their demands. But for that there is lot of money which is required.
And the resources for sanitation is not even 10 per cent of the requirement. The better way of dealing with such a situation is to shed the responsibility of the ‘state’ and pass it on to the private players. We have witnessed how miserably they have failed in handling either the solid or the liquid waste in the cities.
In the given situation another way of making people realise that a lot is happening is by spending huge sums into the advertisement campaign. Till 2017, Mr Modi had spent Rs 530 crore in just
publicity offering huge money to some of his favourites in the media-both print and electronic. Manoj Kumar Jha, who heads Delhi University’s Social Work Department, said that the campaign is more focused on spectacle and how it is portrayed in the media than on changing ground realities.
The campaign has an unambiguous clarity about what is to be projected. The projection has to be of a single man and his vision of transformation which however is completely divorced from reality. The reality and the truth is what all of us know. Bitter!
