After Over a Decade, Swachh Bharat Mission has Come a Cropper

India may be famous for many things, but the cleanliness of public places is not one among them.

- Anand Neelakantan

India may be famous for many things, but the cleanliness of public places is not one among them. In 1927, a white supremacist and racist, Katherine Mayo, wrote a polemical book named Mother India and spewed her prejudice and racial hatred through her book, which Mahatma Gandhi termed as a drain inspector's report. Though the book is a typical white liberal gaze on lesser creatures of darker skin colour, many things she wrote about the cleanliness of Indians remain true even after a century. Social media is awash with plenty of whites trying to make quick money out of reels that focus on filthy India. They can't be blamed as Indians get outraged easily at the truth and have a thin skin for criticism, but have no qualms in keeping the country as one open garbage pit. The result is that India has the reputation of being the filthiest country in the world, with only our neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh giving a stiff competition.

The Swachh Bharat Mission was launched with much fanfare in 2014. At that time, it was reported that only 40 per cent of Indian homes had toilets, and 60 per cent practised open defecation. There were huge regional variations in this data, and the laggard states of the Gangetic belt had almost 80 per cent open defecation in the rural areas.

The campaign aimed to make India open defecation-free by 2019. Celebrities were roped in, and thousands of crores were spent on building toilets, printing flex hoardings of smiling netas and advertising slogans about cleanliness.