Last week, there was one incident which turned the world media towards the Japanese football fans. They had done something which Western countries had taught for years in schools and colleges but still failed to implement especially after a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup. I remember once attending a new year celebration in Cologne a few years back on the banks of the river Rhine. People were drunk.Ambulances were parked anticipating casualties. Out of the blue, a fully drunk man threw a cracker ready to burst into the crowd. A girl was badly injured due to this incident. The whole city was turned into a litter box within a night. The authorities cleaned the city the very next day and the city regained its cleanliness.
What made the otherwise cleanliness conscious Germans to go berserk on such days? What made the Japanese clean up stadiums in Brasil in spite of not being told to do so? In India, from the great Mahatma Gandhi to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, every leader which India has produced has stressed on cleanliness. In spite of the same, why has it not translated into ground reality? The answer to this is complex.
In a country of 1.2 Billion people, it is hard for the government to indeed clean up every nook and corner of the country. I see that we as a population tend to discuss a lot about issues. We have very strong opinions about what the government must do to it's people, who should benefit out of that and so on. But at the ground level, we are unaware sometimes apathetic towards what our role towards improving the cleanliness in our cities is. In that sense, i feel the ideas will not come from Chief Ministers, MPs or MLAs because simply it does not affect their votes. Even if it does affect their vote, how can you be sure that the opposite candidate will be sympathetic to these concerns? What is the real solution to the problem?
The answer lies in strong civil societies. Civil societies need to take proactive measures to make things like sanitation, water scarcity, waste management for plastics, glass, dangerous goods etc. their issues and engage in constant dialogue or maybe even lobbying to achieve their priorities. In that sense, AAP's idea of "Mohalla Sabha" was indeed innovative (only if they had the stability to implement the same) . Local self governments, schools, educators, NGOs and the most important of the lot "common people" have a very key role to play in the execution.
Another key role is played by culture. After the Fukushima disaster I read a story in the BBC, which mentioned that there were Japaneese veterans who volunteered to clean up the nuclear waste disregarding nuclear radiation. No matter how much you enforce, unless cleanliness is made a culture, it will be compromised at some point or the other.
Along with fast rates of economic growth and prosperity of our population, environmental issues get bulldozed. A nation cannot be built only on industries and economic growth. China's smog and particulate emissions have reached such alarming levels leading to respiratory problems for its current generation and will stay for generations to come. It is important for our nation to think on its own feet and to find cost effective ways of dealing with such problems. New business ideas will also emerge for waste management if encouraged.
The implementation of local schemes require a certain level of commitment from the local people too. Gone are those days where more than 70% institutions were run by the state. Slogans like "Less Government and more Government" have found its way through to the Indian voters. Government's role in the future will be that of just a facilitator or sometimes even a roadblock in implementing public interest. Hence it is time that one thought about the "clean up act" from the roots.
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