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Business News/ Opinion / India’s real Kurukshetra
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India’s real Kurukshetra

If India does not bring its sanitation, health, water and power problems under control, the country will decay and grind to dust

Progress awaits the acceptance on the part of every Indian that he has a health crisis on his hands and that it is a matter of life and death for himself and his family. Photo: MintPremium
Progress awaits the acceptance on the part of every Indian that he has a health crisis on his hands and that it is a matter of life and death for himself and his family. Photo: Mint

I am sitting here in Madurai in my parents’ house in Kochadai. It is June and it is very hot—hotter than I felt in March, when I came last. Mosquitoes seem unusually a larger menace than before. I had to buy a so-called ‘strong version’ of a mosquito repellent. I do not know the brand name. Plus, I have to make sure that I am smeared with a mosquito repellent skin cream too. It is not advisable to do one’s daily prayers, etc., with the upper torso uncovered, unless one chooses to empty half a tube of anti-mosquito cream on the body.

We do not know the cost of ingesting the fumes from the mosquito repellent and applying these creams on a daily basis. India’s health problem is silent (and not-so-silent), smelly, bloody, pervasive and menacing. It is the Kurukshetra for India.

As I was contemplating all this, I realized how big a problem India and Indians are facing with their own attitude (benign tolerance) towards filth and lack of hygiene. Health consciousness, for the most part, seems lacking. Irregular eating habits, hours and lack of adequate physical activity are its manifestations. Well-known Tamil Shaivite Nayanar, Thirumoolar, had written in his “Thirumanthiram" that if one believed that God resided in all of us, then the body was the temple. Therefore, it behoved us to look after the temple in which God resides. We do not seem to be able to make the connection between our body and our beliefs.

Then, there is the unconcern surrounding environmental hygiene and sanitation. This is self-destructive. Good environmental hygiene and sanitation is not just a common good. It is a private good. It is just that we fail to make the connection.

Coincidentally, I came across this (https://mintne.ws/1mKl59M) article in Mint on the morning of Friday, the 13th of June. It has been originally published in Bloomberg. This article mentions that bad sanitation deters tourists: “A lack of toilets also deters tourists, with at least three studies showing India poses the highest risk to travellers of picking up multiple drug-resistant strains of faecal bacteria."

Forget about tourists and travellers. They are a few millions compared to the 1.1 or 1.2 billion Indians who live onshore daily. They are exposed to these bacteria on a daily basis, even if they travel in air-conditioned cars. They do inhale fumes when stuck in traffic hold-ups and in traffic signals. These fumes might be laced with faecal bacteria. I will be relieved if someone calls me stupid for mixing up things and that these things do not happen. Even then, only a small minority of Indians will escape ingesting these bacteria.

Forget about containing the fiscal deficit, labour reforms, nuclear deterrence, etc. If India does not bring its sanitation, health, water and power problems under control, it can have all that it wants of smart cities, IITs, IIMs and super-high speed trains but the country will decay and grind to dust. Civilisations have disappeared more because of these issues than because of war.

Among all the continents, Asia has the worst balance between population (more) and water (less). In Asia, India in particular is more vulnerable because of global warming, due to the damming of Himalayan rivers by China and due to indiscriminate discharge of pollutants and effluents into its arterial rivers by Indians. Other civilisations will find it hard to match the feat of despoiling of water and rivers by Indians who worship both.

Of course, the challenge is really for the country and not just for the government. The government can and should use education—carrot and stick. The article in Mint makes an important point and I doubt if it is wide off the mark: “Convincing rural Indians to use toilets may prove a bigger challenge than building them," Rosenboom said. “After centuries of practising open defecation, some families refuse to end the cultural norm because using a toilet is sometimes associated with filth and low social status."

“Open defecation cannot end on the planet without it ending in India first," Rosenboom said in New Delhi. “Beyond just toilets, India needs to tell its people that this behaviour is not acceptable and is damaging to society."

Indians have to take themselves and their problems seriously before others take the nation seriously. Expecting the government to do all the heavy lifting to solve social problems is neither feasible nor correct. Perhaps, the government and its leaders can inspire others by setting example through personal behaviour—on hygiene, on civic sense, on social responsibility, on respecting queues and in maintaining public decorum and order, etc. The Prime Minister was right to stress the importance of cleaner offices and its impact on employee morale and productivity.

But, progress awaits the acceptance on the part of every Indian that he has a health crisis on his hands and that it is a matter of life and death for himself and his family.

V. Anantha Nageswaran is co-founder of Aavishkaar Venture Fund and Takshashila Institution. Comments are welcome at baretalk@livemint.com. To read V. Anantha Nageswaran’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/baretalk-

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Published: 16 Jun 2014, 04:22 PM IST
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