‘Swachh Bharat’ is bound to fail

In all, over 300 million will be helped with “solid waste management practices” and this is to be achieved by 2019 and will cost the nation Rs 62,009 crore. This is not a sum that we cannot afford. Will India become a cleaner, healthier and more hygienic nation, less offensive to sight and smell? I don’t think so and the Swachh Bharat campaign too will end up as a failure.

Nevertheless the Prime Minister must be lauded for flagging this as a priority. But more than intentions, he must look at ways to implement his plans. His ambitions are huge. He also hopes to build one hundred smart cities with 24x7 drinking water, zero garbage disposal and total solid waste management with full-scale drainage and sewerage systems. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto did promise a hundred new cities. And rightly so because new cities are imperative, as by 2050 India will almost double its present urban population by adding another 450 million. It is this urbanisation that will also be its major driver of economic growth.

The Andhra Pradesh government has estimated that a new capital will cost it Rs 100,000 crore. Projecting that, a hundred new cities with an average of a million people each will cost us Rs 100-120 lakh crore over the next 25-35 years. It’s a huge sum, but the begging, borrowing and scrimping have to start now.

But even if we find the money where is the public administration to do it? We now have a highly centralised system more suitable to governing India than serving India. The structure of our public administration, with its preponderance at the national and state capitals and with a tiny fraction left to interface with citizens at a local level, and even these not being answerable to citizens is at the root of our inability to transform this country.

When India became Independent, Jawaharlal Nehru advocated disbanding the British inherited civil service and wanted a new system of public administration that will not just preserve order to facilitate extraction, but will drive change and equitable development. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel however was against such a radical transformation of government, and preferred India to be administered by an elite civil service such as the ICS (Indian Civil Service).

This led to the creation of the Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service as the main instruments of administration. But the system remained as before, a system to maintain control rather than transform. The consequences of this are still apparent. The three levels of government together employ about 185 lakh persons. The Central government employs 34 lakh, all the state governments together employ another 72.18 lakh, quasi-government agencies account for a further 58.14 lakh, and at the local government-level, a tier with the most interface with the common citizens, we have only 20.53 lakh employees.

This simply means we have five persons ordering us about, for every one supposedly serving us. What this translates into is that if you build toilets, you won’t have enough people to clean them. As it is garbage pick up is selective, tardy and the signs of failure can be seen in all our cities and villages.