2	3	4	Corruption, Indian politicians, dirt, filth, sanitation, toilet,

The Dirt and Filth Nobel Prize

Too bad that there isn’t a Nobel prize in the Dirt and Filth category. India would have added one more to its pitifully small collection of Nobel prizes. Minister of the Gandhi realm, Jairam Ramesh, said at a recent public event, “Our cities are the dirtiest cities of the world. If there is a Nobel prize for dirt and filth, India will win it, no doubt.”

One would be hard-pressed to disagree with the claim since India is indeed dirty and filthy beyond reason. It says something about the culture of the people. I’ll get to it in a bit.

For now, here’s another statistic that would not surprise anyone who has seen the real India. Any day of the week, any time of the day, you can see men urinating with their backs turned to the street. (What women do is beyond my imagination.) Look out of a train any morning and you have to avert your eyes from the hundreds of people defecating along the train tracks.

A recent AFP news item reports that 600 million people lack toilets in India. That’s twice the size of the entire population of the US.

In slum areas, where more than half of Mumbai lives, an average 81 people share a single toilet. In some places it rises to an eye-watering 273. Even the lowest average is still 58, according to local municipal authority figures. 

Unsurprisingly, it is still common to see people squatting by roads and railway tracks or along the coast, openly defecating in the city that drives India's economy and where some of the world's richest people live. 

The UN estimates that 600 million people or 55 percent of Indians still defecate outside, more than 60 years after . . . independence.

That report makes for horrifying reading. Did you know that around 1,000 Indian children below five die of preventable diseases like diarrhoea every day? Every day! Every year over a third of a million Indian kids below five die, all because of a lack of adequate sanitation.

Sanitation is a public good. The availability of public goods – just like private goods – depends on the supply as well as the demand. It can be argued that the demand for sanitation is low. People are content to just go along with the lack of sanitation. And then there is the problem of supply.

Vote banks and toilets

Public facilities like toilets and urinals in public places have to be provided for through public funds. Public funds are allocated based on what those who control the public purse consider to be high priority. Providing public toilets is not a priority.

Let’s briefly go into that. Public toilets are available to all people. If the politicians spend public money, say, $200 million on public toilets, the entire population benefits. That does not help the politicians gain votes because the money spent cannot be used to differentially benefit some particular vote bank.

Instead, politicians want to spend on things that benefit some specific vote bank. My favourite example of such spending is the subsidy for Haj. Thousands of crores of rupees are spent on a totally worthless exercise which has no welfare effects. But that gets them the “Muslim vote.”

It is a matter of priorities. Politicians are motivated by one concern: how to get more votes from specific constituencies. That the public can be so easily manipulated is a reflection of the poor culture of the public. It is a clichéd observation but nonetheless true, the public deserve the government they get. The public get the public facilities that they deserve.

The culture has to change. Let me tell you a story.

Indian trash

The other day, I was being driven to the Mumbai airport by a friend. We were stuck in stop-and-go traffic (surprise, surprise). I noticed that out of the taxi in front of us, a flurry of shredded papers would emerge every few minutes. Clearly someone in the back seat of the taxi was going through his or her papers and using the street as a trash can.

My anger was boiling over. I shredded a large handful of scrap paper, got out of our car, and walked over to the taxi. In the back seat was a woman dressed in business clothes going through her paperwork. I threw it in her face and said, “I think you dropped these by mistake. Now stuff it where it belongs.”

The traffic started moving. I got back into the car. The woman in the taxi continued to throw trash out of the car. That was a woman who probably comes from at least a middle class family, most likely went to college, and probably gets a decent wage. Judging by the amount of trash everywhere in India, her behaviour must be considered typical of Indians.

Japanese sensibility

That same day on the flight to the US, I was listening to an audio book. David Sedaris reading his book, “When you are engulfed in flames.” The title of the book is taken from a notice in a Japanese hotel room giving instructions to guests on what to do during various emergencies. The book was about his experiences during his recent extended stay in Japan.

David tells the most entertaining stories. Listen to a recording of his live performance at Carnegie Hall, especially the story, “Six or Eight Black Men.” You will roll on the floor laughing.

Anyway, back to his Japan book. In one chapter he recounts a train ride. A Japanese couple with a very young child settled next to him. When the kid indicated to his father that he wanted to look out of the window, the father gave him a look which said, “But you did that already last month.” The mother was more understanding.

She pulled out a hand towel out of her bag and placed it on the seat near the window. She then took off the child’s shoes and allowed the child to stand on the towel to look out of the window. The child was excited and as he stood he slapped the window pane with his little hands at the passing scenery.

When it was time for the family to leave, the mother sat the child on the seat, put his shoes back on, folded and packed the towel in the bag. Then she took a napkin out of her bag and carefully wiped the window clean to remove any handprints the child may have made.

That’s one example of what polite and decent people do – don’t leave a mess behind. I have never seen anyone in Indian trains do anything out of consideration for the absent others. Most of the time, they will just chuck stuff out of the window.

Chuck it

In AC train compartments in India, you cannot open the windows. So the compartment’s inside is an acceptable trash bin. The funniest I have ever seen was once when I was standing at the door of the train, Deccan Queen, watching the wonderful Western Ghats. A man came of out of the AC compartment, and threw trash out the door – even though there was a garbage bin right below the wash basin next to the door. When I asked why he did that, he gave me a look that basically said that I had asked a very stupid question.  

India’s population does not value cleanliness. Conversely, they are not unhappy to live in filth and dirt. If they valued a clean environment, they would have had it – both through private actions and through their voting for those who spend public money on public sanitation. The public does not demand it and the politicians don’t care to provide it.

This behaviour is not part of what I call “deep culture.” India does have a valuable deep culture but the outer layers – or surface culture – are seriously shameful. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the surface culture is easy enough to change, provided there’s good leadership.

Singapore is one shining example of how the surface culture can be changed. Lee Kuan Yew turned Singapore into one of the cleanest modern cities in less than a generation. He understood very clearly that a clean environment is a necessity for human dignity.

Alas, India does not have an LKY. It has the Congress party – which is known for its corruption and filth. Congress and corruption are conjoined twins. Where one is, the other is too. Everyone knows how many thousands of crore rupees it has looted, and how many thousands of crores political parties allied to it have looted. Indians don’t seem to care about it since they continue to vote for the same corrupt politicians and political parties.

Bathrooms and freedom

It is all of a piece. There is a connection between poverty, overpopulation, corruption, and lack of public utilities. Overpopulation has to be understood in terms of how many people, how much resources, and the efficiency with which those resources are used.

India’s resources are not adequate for the population it has. With 17 percent of the world’s population but with only 2 percent of the world’s land area, there is bound to be over-crowding. Over-crowding is not conducive to human dignity.

I like how Isaac Asimov put it in an interview with Bill Moyers. It is particularly apt in the light of our discussion of toilets. They were discussing population growth rates but the argument holds in our case as well.  

Moyers: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at its present rate?

Asimov: It will be completely destroyed. I will use what I call my bathroom metaphor. Two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, and stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, "Aren't you through yet?" and so on.

The same way democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are the less one individual matters.

(“A World of Ideas” Bill Moyers 1989)

A solution

A couple of weeks ago I was in Delhi. I frequently saw men urinating in public places. I was carrying a camera but never thought of taking a picture to go with this post. Sometimes you have to go and there are no public toilets. They were forced into an indignity and however angry one gets for the public’s stupidity in voting worthless trash into positions of power, one finally feels pity for them.

The worthless trash who live in fine publicly funded spacious air-conditioned houses have multiple marble and granite toilets to use. They travel around in air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices with fine clean toilets. They never are caught on the street, wanting desperately to take a leak.

The solution is clear to me. The worthless trash should be forced to not use their bathrooms in their homes and offices for two days every month. They should be forced to use whatever public facilities that are available. That would solve the problem of underinvestment in public toilets.

This solution will be implemented just after hell freezes over.

In the meanwhile, let's just hope that a new Nobel prize is constituted. Alfred Nobel had not provided for a prize in economics. So the Bank of Sweden paid for a prize which is awarded as an economics Nobel prize. It is sort of appropriate for a bank to fund the economics prize. Now the prize for "Filth and Dirt" should be appropriately funded. I suggest that the politicians ruling India fund this prize. They have untold billions of dirty money. It would be appropriate.

Mera Bharat Mahan.