Kushan Mitra
About a month ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had declared that cleanliness was the need of the hour and had launched the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) by symbolically cleaning a low-income area in central Delhi. The campaign has been marked with much fanfare and with a large number of advertisements – and in itself, there is little doubt that this initiative is much needed.
However, days after the launch of the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan on Mahatma Gandhi’s Birth Anniversary, what followed next was journalists’ email inboxes getting clogged with emails seeking publicity. From ministers and bureaucrats to tycoons (and their wives) and Bollywood stars, all were seen conducting an opportunity to get clicked while ostensibly making three to four sweeps of the broom in front of the camera. Surely, there were a few people like Sachin Tendulkar and Sania Mirza who were seen doing the hazardous work of actually cleaning up the waste.
This is not to question the sincerity of the people pictured; many of them are, one can safely predict, well-invested in the idea of a ‘clean India’. One is also pretty certain of the fact that many people in the picture have rarely cleaned up any waste themselves in their pampered lives. Mollycoddled as India’s rich and powerful are, with hired help, they are seen with a man servant holding an expensive designer handbag while the protagonist of one manufactured photo-shoot swept a broom. While it might have seemed hypocritical, it wasn’t terribly surprising.
The fact is that days after Modi announced his mission, on an average morning commute, there are still people who throw wrappers out of the car windows. The fact is that despite innumerable bans and orders from various courts, plastic bags are still handed out and drains are still clogged and landfills are still filled up. And of course, India’s spitting habit, particularly that of Paan, has meant that virtually every public building has red-stained walls. The fact is that the Prime Minister’s mission is a difficult one; some could even argue that it is impossible, because changing Indian’s civic sense, rather, getting Indians to have a civic sense, seems impossible.
Yet, a group of Buddhist monks on a Padyatra between the holy site of Sarnath and Lumbini can show us the way forward – led by His Eminence the Gyalwang Drukpa. He is a Buddhist spiritual leader and he heads the Drukpa Lineage, a school of tantric Buddhism which is the predominant school of Buddhism in Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan.
On this Padyatra, the Gyalwang Drukpa and his entourage of over a thousand monks and nuns will walk in the footsteps of the Buddha. They will not only clean-up behind them but they will also clean roadside trash.
Although it might look like another act of publicity, this is not the case of an organisation jumping onto the Prime Minister’s cleanliness bandwagon for publicity – far from it. Because this is not for the first time that the Gyalwang Drukpa has led a padyatra and this is not for the first time that the monks have cleaned other people’s trash. They have done this several times before.
In previous Padyatras in Maharashra and Ladakh, the monks and nuns have cleaned up trash left by callous fellow citizens. While talking to His Eminence, this columnist asked whether their actions shamed people. He pointed out that shaming people into a better way of living is not necessarily a bad thing. He admitted that sometimes the local population was not particularly happy with the Padyatra showing them in a bad light as being litterers but on the whole the message of cleanliness went through.
The Prime Minister’s parliamentary constituency Varanasi is where the Drukpa monks and nuns will start their Padyatra. If there is any one city that highlights the enormity of the task of cleaning up India, it is Varanasi. The lack of a proper sewage treatment facility and garbage college after decades of neglect have made parts of this holy and ancient city look like a cesspool. A Japanese delegation from Kyoto in the city to explore the ‘twinning’ of the two ancient cities, was left deeply disappointed at the terrible mess.
It may be symbolic to start the Padyatra here, but the journey ahead of cleaning India is going to be a long one. And it is a journey where every Indian citizen will have to play a role. It is imperative that civic duties are inculcated in children at a young age and towards that, it appears that several schools have started teaching their wards about the importance of a clean India.
But there needs to be a another change as well. We do need to realise the immense contribution made by those who clean up behind us. Theirs is a thankless job. Sanitary workers work in hazardous conditions, often going in to overflowing sewers with little or no protection for a salary that in all honesty is inadequate. In the developed world, not only would such workers get hazard pay they would also be provided with top-notch safety
equipment.