Give Clean a Chance

Many years later, as I faced the septic squad of trashcans outside my window, I was to remember that distant afternoon when I first discovered the wonders of Pert Plus shampoo.

I was about eight years old, and after almost two-and-a-half hours of fieldwork in the bathtub, I had come up with an elixir containing the perfect ratio of water to soap to shampoo to satisfy all my cleaning hopes and needs. The bottles were my beakers—some slender and tapered, some pressed into jagged HDPE polyhedrons. I even threw in a couple of Alka-Seltzers for good measure.

Today I’m mostly out of the bathroom alchemy game. I’m certain my roommate would frown upon attempting to turn toothpaste into gold in our shower on campus, and my family has sufficiently convinced me that it's a little childish. But after that day, there were two things that I would love for the rest of my life: cleanliness and experiments.

For the last few weeks I have been captivated by an event that is bringing these two loves of mine together in a way that has never been attempted before. On October 2, the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Mission was officially set into motion. The massive “Clean India” movement, which will ultimately cost upwards of $32 billion, hopes to honor Mahatma Gandhi’s vision—according to the official Swachh Bharat pledge—that India would be “not only free but also clean and developed.” Modi, with broom in hand, is using it this time not to smack MPs who have literally “chests” of cash used to buy votes just “lying around the house,” but to lead by example in the effort to make India radically more sanitary by 2019.

The Swacch Bharat Mission is a display of executive leadership for the ages. The cleanliness pledge began with Modi, but support is cascading through Indian government officials, celebrities, and civilians. This project is not the Indian government’s first ever attempt at a federal sanitation campaign, but it has a far larger likelihood for success, especially given Modi’s Caesar-like ability to gather popular support and conquer seats. The prime minister has called on people of Indian origin outside the country, NGOs, and corporations to join the fight against open defecation, free flowing sewage, and the bores of garbage that accompany the Ganges River’s tidal swellings.

But, as Modi knows, the principal target in this fight must be the Indian culture of indifference toward the problem of public filth. Private homes in India are often spotless, and there are a frankly ridiculous number of pristine five-star hotels in the country. Yet on the streets just outside the Taj Palace New Delhi, all bets are off when it comes to hygiene. Restating self-evident ironies isn’t enough to solve the problem, but neither is throwing villagers piddling incentives to build toilets that can only be reached after wading through India’s bureaucratic mire.

The answer is government, the answer is pressure, and the answer is law. Public cleanliness represents an incredible human achievement, one that can only be attained through both collective dedication and a respected system of rules and regulations. The search for a trashcan or a toilet has to become impulsive, and a prerequisite for that is that there exist enough trashcans and toilets to look for in the first place.

Cleanliness and the respect for law scrub each other on the back. Citizens learn that there are penalties for disrespecting public property, and law holds up its end of the bargain by making government accountable for providing the resources citizens need to actually keep the streets clean. In turn, citizens see that the streets are clean and they respect law even more, because life is a hell-of-a-lot better when you don’t have to play hopscotch over human feces just to get to work.

A little part of me regrets that I personally can’t experiment with shampoo and soap anymore. But amidst a year of world affairs conflagrated with bullying and butchery, it’s genuinely inspiring to see a government experimenting in a way that doesn’t involve Tomahawk Missiles or tear gas.

It’s Modi who is playing with Pert Plus now, and I hope with all my heart that he finds his elixir.

Vivek A. Banerjee ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.