Two years on, we are still far from the goal
There is a remarkable woman I meet every day. I do not know her name and neither does she know mine, but we cross each other daily; I, with a smile laced with guilt, and she with a smile that is simply a smile. I see her regularly from my window as she goes about her work with brisk steps, wasting no time, but never too busy to stop to talk to someone she knows. Every now and then, I see her talking to the tailor who stitches and mends clothes under a lean-to nearby and the gaggle of bored auto-drivers waiting for customers on their matchbox vehicles, reading old news that looks like new and new news that seems all too old of ‘Amma’ and of the ageless Karunanidhi. They seem to like her and enjoy her comments though I cannot hear what they are talking about. It has to be about Tamil Nadu politics, who has done who in, who has spent how much on the elections, on which land deal, cinema deal, crime deal. Brief chat done, she is back at work.
And what is that work?
Like other women in the same shade of deep blue, she is one of Chennai’s street cleaners, a conservancy staffer. An earlier generation would have called her a municipal scavenger. That generation would have given her no sari in blue or any other colour and no instrument other than a weary old broom, short and stiff, which she would have had to bend low to clean with. But this successor, who may even be a descendant of that ‘old’ scavenger, is ‘equipped’ with a uniform, all in a tell-tale blue, gloves, a long rake, a short rake, a small mobile barrow with sturdy wheels, which she pushes around easily. She picks up litter from the side walks, the road, corners, and deposits her collection in never-ending cycles onto a large and rather battered street corner barrow from which garbage vehicles pick it up. She is a great contriver. On the barrow she has devised a way to hang her drinking water bottle and tiff in, the two sources of nourishment that move with her constantly.
By a rough reckoning, she does about 50 round soft he street. The sun is irrelevant to her; she has learnt to cope with its pouring fire in the best way available to her: Supreme indifference. Her forehead and cheeks, a bubble-wrap of sweat-drops; she walks with energy, stoops with agility, straightens up with elan and pushes with aplomb. Most importantly, she does all this with complete dispassion. Neither does she judges the filth she is dealing with nor its makers or throwers. She engages with obvious vivacity in any conversation that she is into, but once that is over, she is back to work. And that requires her to be fit and in a strange self-sustaining way, keeps her fit.
Her imperturbable tranquillity, deep focus, devotion to duty, detachment to results, ‘tireless striving reaching its arms towards perfection’, sound like hollow preachy shibboleths before this vital example of all those and much more. She is much more than the string of platitudes that follow in this sentence: The Tirukkural vivified, the Bhagvad Gita personified, the Gitanjali brought to life. And for sheer contemporaneity and real-time value, she is Frankly Speaking, We The People, Headlines Today, News At Nine, Hard News, To The Point, Devil’ s Advocate put together. She is a walking editorial, a speaking Op-Ed piece.
Some of the things she lifts or sweeps are within her purchasing power — milk and shampoo sachets, gutka, condoms, tooth-paste and rubber slippers. But more than half of the garbage that she handles is made of things and covers things that she could never have bought: Liquor, mineral water, soft drinks, cosmetics, chocolates, pizza covers, hospital waste, Tetra Pak, thermocol, plastic and more plastic. The only way India helps her is by India’s genius for re-cycling, which staggers the creation of throw away garbage by one or two stages and reduces her workload. Other than that her wheel barrow, her instruments are her only assistants. This brave heart gem of a public servant is a symbol of modern India’s consumerist gluttony disgustingly coupled with traditional India’ s casteist and classist relegation of all cleaning to the ‘scavenging order’.
What is Swachh Bharat doing for her and for the thousands like her who do this and the far more challenging ‘moving and removing’ of human faeces from sewers, railway station yards and tracks? Next to nothing. Manual scavenging has been the subject of a most extraordinary nationwide movement for awareness and correction, but the inattention received by that movement has been equally extraordinary.
There is a cess levied in Swachh Bharat’s name, but there is no fine attached to littering. Unless‘ We The People’ are made to pay up for littering, Swachh Bharat will only be about Bharat being made swachh by more and more labour and brave hearts. And there is no sign of any curtailment of the culprit number one of a swachh Bharat — its non bio-degradable tetrapak, thermocol, plastic manufacturing. So long as the ‘tap’ of plastic manufacturing is not turned down or turned off, Bharat will remain flooded with garbage. Moving waste from street to street corner to suburban dump to city boundaries and from there onto village rims, rivers, coasts and then into the sea, is no answer. With his almost obsessive understanding of the subject, Gandhi said garbage is‘ dealt with’ only when it ceases to be garbage.
We are nearing two years of Swachh Bharat and we are still far from its goal. A major course-correction in this inherently commendable programme is vital.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is distinguished professor in history and politics, Ashoka University. The views expressed are personal.