Why we stink

Hardnews Bureau Delhi

For more than two months now, the country has been racked by all kinds of epidemics. Triggered by the bite of the dreaded Aedes mosquito, chikungunya and dengue fever have felled many young and old. There are thousands more who have been traumatised by these viral fevers and are slowly recuperating from them. These epidemics have lowered productivity and resulted in colossal loss in working hours. Dengue and chikungunya are just seasonal viruses that have hit people in the country. There are millions of people in the country who suffer from dysentery or fall victims to malaria due to poor quality of drinking water and lack of hygiene.

Quite expectedly, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss blamed poor sanitary conditions and inadequate waste disposal that spawn these deadly mosquitoes. He is not the only one who has done that and surely would not be the last. Many a time in the past, senior government functionaries have made brave noises to clean up India, but without any manifest results. In 1991, Delhi's lieutenant governor, Romesh Bhandari, had appointed a committee to figure out how the Capital could be cleaned. The report suggested cleaning up of the air, water and roads. While Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit can be credited for cleaning up the air, one area that still hits visitors is the stink that seems to overhang in large parts of Delhi. This stench is of people defecating in public, of putrefying waste.

Whenever the train heads towards urban clusters one does not see anything but people relieving themselves in different poses. Our cities have become huge toilets. The public conveniences that have been established are seldom used, as many of us feel purer pissing in the open than doing it privately. Is it a typical South Asian trait or is there something wrong with the religion we practise, which gives precedence to purity of the soul and not the environment. Not surprisingly, many of our temple towns, such as Benares and Ajmer Sharif, where the priestly class calls the shots, are the dirtiest. What is a matter of surprise is that, save for Mahatma Gandhi, all the ‘Gods, Godmen and Gurus’, who display an obsessive fetish for spiritual cleanliness, never felt the need for reinterpreting Hinduism or Islam to keep the environment clean, at least in India. For many it has something to do with the inadequacy of the religion to

comprehend what is of greater good to the community. Quality sanitation can change the lives of communities.

If people can be told, even by the religious heads, that defecating in the open can pollute our water bodies and literally bring “shit home”, then, surely, it would make an impact. It is important that the government works towards providing safe drinking water and toilets to people living in slums. This can be done on the basis of public-private partnership of the kind successfully executed in Orangi, the biggest slum in Karachi, where sewer lines were laid and toilets built after the community decided that a clean environment was more important than anything else. Similar interventions are required in India, too. The governments at various levels should look for ways as to how can dispose garbage off without hurting the interests of scavengers, ragpickers and the citizenry. All these steps are required to ensure that deadly viruses do not acquire epidemic proportions and hurt the productivity of large sections of people who are critical for attaining high level of economic growth. As conclusively established by several economists, good health, public welfare and economic development go hand in hand and any government that fails abysmally in this regard has always found itself in the trashcan of history.