Much like our democracy, in healthcare too we tend to corrupt ourselves. Democracy in India often takes the form of over-democratisation making things fall apart, similarly policy decisions in basic healthcare are found wanting because there is hardly enough applied back-up support for a decision taken.

If all huts, shanties, households in rural India build up a toilet each, and they should do that, the next question is where to treat the sewer water and the sewer sludge. Does India have a mechanism in place for that? That is a question of basic Quality Science.

A ministry can be formed for river purification; allocation of funds, national drive for awareness about the necessity of clean surface water bodies etc. can be carried out vigorously in the length and the breadth of the country – but all would end up as palliative steps, because adequate back-up support system is wanting.

Our governance historically adopts strategies, which can be called bildungsroman development, just as Charles Dickens tried with Pip and Tagore with Gora. This may sound like a jargon here, because development of India is a trope every political party over the last sixty-seven years has been talking about vigorously. There is nothing like bildungsroman, which means grooming something or somebody into perfection.

Though 2,35,000-plus strong online community the Prime Minister’s Local Circle seem more enthusiastic of the idea within, a thread that seems to be missing still is that solving India’s ugliness problem, the A-Swacch Bharat, is just not a palliative call. Therefore, their suggestions about the most important three things that this government should do just scratch the surface and address only the temporary expectations.

What is Swacch Bharat?

The ‘Swacch Bharat’ drive aims to improve the basic healthcare system in the country. The permanent solutions to these problems should be addressing the fundamental corrections, which, by the statute, are state subjects. This, the Indian states miserably fail at doing.

Advices generally — such as removal of plastics from the drains, or not throwing the waste or the plastic bag in the open, or creating an R&D over the waste management — are mere palliative ideas, which India has been talking about for last six decades and has miserably failed at implementing.

The think-tanks in the country today are expected to look at the problems at the grassroots. Just as in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, the legislative leader becomes the leader of all people belonging to all affiliations, similarly, while identifying the national problems, the national leaders are expected to look for concrete ideas for change, even if these come from quarters not of their usual affiliations.

Because intelligent people may also come from other parties beyond BJP. It is also because Swacch Bharat addresses a national problem and not a partisan task.

In most parts of the country today, people face n number of physical problems, such as seasonal floods, absence of toilets for the poor and rural bases, drains logged with filth and water, ill-managed wastes in rural and semi-urban India, absence of pure trace-material-free drinking water, pollution of ground water or wasting it, water contaminated by trace materials causing cancer and other serious ailments, joblessness due to ill-managed Panchayats, domination of men over the women workers in Panchayats, non-availability of roads or electricity, no dump yards for household garbage, corpses and animal carcasses thrown into rivers, and so on and so forth.

We need to solve these first. Fencing the rivers and creating tourist spots are mere palliative thoughts. We have to think deeper, and should enlist the following:

A. Ensuring financial support to the grassroots people through Jan Dhan Yojana scheme for constructing toilets in their huts or houses. The Yojana till now has only assured a bank’s guarantee for free medication upto Rs 1,00,000. But there can be Indian Oil type schemes for depositing money to Jan Dhan Yojana accounts for building toilets. This money should come voluntarily from Indian political parties and PSUs’ CSR savings. Many political parties elicit donations from abroad in the name of development work. Where do these donations go?

B. Large and small drains should be constructed in villages and semi-urban India. The local area development (LAD) funds of the MPs, MLAs, and the elected leaders in Panchayats and municipalities are endowed with huge funds every year. They must be tasked to utilize these monies for construction of such basic healthcare amenities as large and small drains.

C. There should be a small or mini Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) in every block, depending upon the size of the block. The Panchayats, Block Development Officers (BDO) and the local police should monitor them. These STPs would treat the sewage from households and the rural and semi-urban expanses. The sludge can be recycled to produce fuels, like gobar gas or even coke coals that villagers often use today. Such an arrangement would give villagers an additional option for energy, and reduce the problems of thinning the forests by wood-cutting, which they traditionally do.

D. The river and coasts should be managed by construction of boulders-made walls just as they do for resorts and hotels at tourist spots in some parts of coastal and river-bank towns. This would stop damages from seasonal floods, and the drains would flow out the flood water faster.

All this would create jobs in rural and semi-urban areas. Indeed our government of the day does know all this. (IPA Service)