MISSION 2019 (Swachh Bharat – Clean India Campaign) is not going to be easy Horribly poor governance for a long time has made the problems of sanitation and cleanliness so entrenched in urban India that they do not yield to easy and quick solutions. Day before yesterday, I went around the slums in Vakola, which is next to the Mumbai airport in Santacruz. Here is a community toilet that abuts the wall, with a barbed wire fence on top of it, separating the airport from the slum. In my previous post, I have shown that the toilets did not have doors. They had no water and no electricity either. By the way, 78% of slum toilets in Mumbai (where 60% of the city’s population lives) have no water and 58% of them have no electricity. Next to the toilet block was an open gutter filled with sewage. Many slum toilets are without proper sewage disposal system. A local woman angrily told us: “During rains this stinking sewage overflows and enters all the nearby homes. How can people live in these conditions? We have complained to the municipal administration a hundred times. They don’t fix the problem. Once in five years, politicians come to us for votes and make big problems. Once elected, they never ever come here to see how we live.” I thank Shri Bharat Vishwakarma and Smt. Shilpa Dharad, who run one of the best NGOs in the city (its called Vakola ALM) for showing me this stark reality. I also thank my colleagues from the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Sanitation, Cleanliness and Community Health -- Shri Dayanand Jadhav, Shri Dilip Kadam and Shri Dayanand Mohite – for facilitating this visit. The same night, we heard Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, in his eloquent speech at Madison Square Garden in New York, make a passionate plea to make India Clean by 2019. The Prime Minister’s mission is commendable. All of us must work hard to make it a success. But let’s remember: It’s not going to be easy.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 02:23:37 +0000