India's railway lines show the dirty picture of Swachh Bharat

It has for long been believed to be true, that rail journeys take you to "real India". Mahatma Gandhi, the moment he arrived in this country from South Africa in 1914, was advised by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, his political guru, to board a train and criss-cross the country. The journey prepared him well for understanding the idea of India.

Over 100 years later, a train journey still provides "true status" of where the country stands and also appraises the government’s big-ticket promises.

My recent train journey from Delhi to Jaipur did something similar, as I could see chinks in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan armour.

The Swachh Bharat mission is Modi’s big-ticket social game changer intended to transform millions of lives in both rural and urban areas to stop defecating in the fields and instead opting for closed-door toilets. But the reality, even as the Modi government is about to complete two years, remains grim, with people still openly defecating along railway tracks.

As the Ajmer Shatabdi started chugging from New Delhi Railway Station and soon after it crossed Sadar Bazar and entered Sarai Rohilla, many passengers opted to pull the window curtains down to avoid these "dirty pictures" along the tracks.

There was, however, a bigger embarrassment in store for me. My co-passenger, Murad Akhtar, a Bangladeshi businessman, was abhorred to see so many people openly defecating in India.

"Bahut gandgi hai yahan (It’s too dirty here)," said he matter-of-factly as he referred to using rail tracks as open-air toilets. "How can the women also come out on tracks to relieve? In my country (Bangladesh), this is near impossible for many years now and we are almost zero open defecation country in South Asia," he claimed.

Akhtar was right. A latest report on country-wise sanitation status says that in Bangladesh, which was once described as "bottomless basket", open defecation has been reduced to nearly 1 per cent, which was almost 42 per cent in 2003.

India, on the other hand, is still a country where about 50 per cent of its population — 595 million — don’t use toilets. Even Pakistan, with 21 per cent not using toilets, is better placed.

Sri Lanka is next to Bangladesh in achieving the “house with a toilet’’ target. India’s toilet use is worse than Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Burundi and Rwanda!

PM Modi embarked on his Swachh Bharat mission targeting to build nearly 12 crore toilets by 2019. But as per the latest figures presented in Parliament, just about a quarter of the year-wise target is in sight.

At the ideation level, there is nothing wrong with Modi’s Swachh Bharat mission. It is at the execution stage where things get flawed. Perhaps the execution strategy needs to be changed and made more result-centric.

Keep out the politicians who are out to hold brooms and clean toilets only to post their pictures on social media; the right approach would be to tap community leaders, NGOs at the grassroots, and local unemployed youth to build the targeted toilets.

The "dirty picture" won’t change overnight; the government should be prepared for a long haul. Even Bangladesh took nearly 13 years to reach this level of zero-defecation in the open. But the battle has to be incessant and non-compromising. For, the malaise is as much about poverty as it is about the culture where filth and open defecation is readily accepted.

The issue should also be connected with health and people should be told in no uncertain terms how nearly 400 children die every day from diarrhoea, which is linked with poor sanitation.

As an Indian, I got embarrassed when the Bangladeshi guest called my "Incredible India" dirty. And he had reasons to say so. But what’s worse is that along with the photographs of the famous Taj Mahal, he would also take back the images of "dirty India’".

It’s time to correct this image and put the Swachh Bharat mission on a fast-track; a beginning in this regard can be made from the railway tracks themselves.

One can, in the meantime, take solace from the fact that young rural girls have started refusing to get married in homes without toilets.

(Coutesy of Mail Today.)