Sanitised epidemic

Why is this famous ghost, ‘civic sense’, so starkly absent? Is it not because of our casteist ideas of personal and familial purity, never mind the hygiene of the wider, shared public space?

Vikram Bedi Delhi

In Mumbai a while ago, wondering how to get to the local-train station, I asked someone in the amorphous crowd, and was told to go straight and turn right ‘at the overflowing rubbish heap’. Garbage as landmark: as routine and central to the urban Indian sensory experience.

Back in New Delhi, I was witness to an abrasive dispute between a landlady in an up market South Delhi colony and the (dalit) garbage-removal contractor hired by the local welfare association. She was viscerally objecting to his new exorbitant rate of Rs 30 a month. She apparently felt no responsibility for her garbage. I got the distinct impression she would dump her household waste for free in a vacant private or public plot, if that were only convenient and safe enough. She just wanted distance between her space and her garbage, at the lowest possible cost— no question of segregating waste or of being concerned about where the garbage from her colony was going, with what effects on the natural and human ecology of her city. This lady, punctilious in her domestic sanitation and hygiene, let me emphasise, is from a ‘clean’ upper caste-class family located high in the rigid Hindu caste hierarchy.

I was in a Delhi slum ‘rehabilitation’ colony recently, one fitted out by the government with drains and public toilets. Except that the admittedly well-built sewer-drains were open, choked with solid refuse, full of stagnant, fetid water, layered with mosquitoes in grand repose. The impressive public lavatory-cum-bath had been contracted out not to a local residents’ association but to a private operator whose rates were such that, for a family of, say, five, to bathe and relieve themselves just once a day, would require a monthly ‘toilet budget’ of well over Rs 1,000! And this, for impoverished families with average, highly uncertain incomes of scarcely Rs 3,000.

So why do people throw their garbage into the drains, thereby clogging it, I asked a number of residents. The government hasn’t provided large refuse bins for each street, what else to do? But weren’t you just complaining of the diseases that afflict your kids because of these infernal choked, putrid drains? Yes, but what to do? And besides, there’s no point being full of civic concern when you are pretty much the only one being responsible. If everyone cooperates, so will I. Till such time, what else to do?

Meanwhile, as if we weren’t disease-riddled enough, epidemics of dengue and chikungunya have broken out, giving the media an ideal, suitably sensationalist topic, with just the right mix of danger, incomprehension and scandalous

government culpability. One wonders why epidemics are perversely good commercial news, but not endemics like malnourishment, anaemia, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera. Perhaps because these are, for the most part, afflictions of the poor, not of the cable news-watching respectable types, able to afford decent-to-lavish food, clean, well-serviced housing, drinkable water, health-hygiene-education-information, and, of course, private health care.