NEW DELHI // Trash littered the side street where Ashok Kapoor’s grocery shop stands, in the congested market of Adhchini in south Delhi.
Mr Kapoor eyed the refuse warily: discarded chocolate wrappers, banana skins, crumpled paper, potato-crisp packets and used batteries.
“I see it happen in front of my eyes,” Mr Kapoor said. “People come to my shop, buy their biscuits or chips or whatever, eat while they linger in the lane, toss the packet aside, and proceed on their way.”
The city’s trash collectors, Mr Kapoor, 54, said, sometimes skip his locality for two or three days. Even when they do their rounds of Adhchini, they fail to do a thorough job, he said.
But Mr Kapoor has not put a trash bin outside his own shop, and he does not pick up after his customers in the interests of keeping his vicinity tidy. “That’s not my job,” he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.
It is people like Mr Kapoor and his customers that prime minister Narendra Modi hopes to change with the Clean Indian Mission. Launched on Thursday, to coincide with anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, Mr Modi stressed that the responsibility of keeping India clean rested upon the shoulders of every citizen.
“Is cleaning just the job of a sweeper?” Mr Modi said. “Is it not our duty too? Do citizens have no role in this? We have to change this mindset.”
The prime minister urged his people to set aside two hours a week to work towards cleanliness in their locality. “If you see dirt anywhere, take a picture and upload it on social media. Then take a video of you cleaning it and then upload the photo of the clean spot.”
Mr Modi’s government has announced that it will pour nearly 2 trillion rupees (Dh119.43 billion) over the next five years into the Clean India Mission.
Money for this project is being funnelled through the urban development ministry as well as the ministry of drinking water and sanitation.
Government officials were asked to come in to work on Thursday — Ghandi’s birthday is a national holiday — to clean their offices, including the bathrooms, as Gandhi used to do.
Before his speech, Mr Modi grabbed a broom and swept the side of a road in Valmiki Basti, a Delhi neighbourhood where many members of the Valmiki group live. People from this community, belonging to the Dalit caste, have traditionally been tasked with cleaning human waste.
The cleanliness mission will run up against the hierarchies of caste, Pravin Panchal, a researcher at the Environmental Sanitation Institute, a think tank, told Reuters.
“Modi will have to deal with society’s failure to liberate the Dalits from the demeaning profession if he wants India to be as clean as Singapore,” Mr Panchal said.
Mr Modi will also be under pressure to ensure that his government’s initial burst of enthusiasm can be sustained.
On Thursday, sanitation workers were out in force in several places.
At the bustling New Delhi Railway Station, uniformed men hosed down the tracks and swabbed the platforms with mops as well as automatic cleaning machines.
In the capital’s streets, pavements were swept clean. In a park in South Delhi, a woman in a fluorescent orange jacket surveyed the grounds, picking rubbish up with her gloved hands and depositing it into a sack.
Despite the energetic volunteerism on display, the piles of trash that remained were a reminder there was much more work to be done to achieve the mission’s goal.
The pile outside Mr Kapoor’s shop in Adhchini was matched a couple of kilometres away, at the entrance to the Hauz Khas Village complex of restaurants and shops.
Here, a large rubbish receptacle overflowed onto the street like any other day, prompting people to wrinkle their noses as they passed.
At the Hauz Khas metro station, one man shone the banisters of staircases. Another used a wet mop to clean the area near the ticket counters.
Jyoti Pandey, 22, a university student, watched the cleaning as she waited in line to buy tickets.
She had caught part of Mr Modi’s speech on television, she said.
“It’s a very good ambition, but it’s also a massive challenge,” she said. “We’ve just learnt to live alongside littered streets for too long now. Rather than cleaning the streets up, people have to learn to not litter them in the first place.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
