It happened in seconds at Delhi\u2019s busy ITO intersection, one of those crossings where the city seems to pulse with impatience. Vehicles coughed smoke, traffic lights blinked in vain, and pedestrians negotiated their survival between honking and hurried indifference. A man standing a few feet away casually spat a thick stream of red saliva. It landed with ugly precision on my shoes.<\/p>\n
Before I could react, he looked at me and smiled, his mouth still full of gutka or paan masala, his lips stained. Then, almost cheerfully, he waved and walked away, as though a crimson splash on a stranger\u2019s shoes was the most ordinary thing in the world. Not an offence. Not an embarrassment. Not even a lapse in civic sense. Just routine. I stood there in stunned disbelief. Then, strangely, I smiled too: a smile of pity, perhaps resignation, at the tragic normality of it all.<\/p>\n
As I walked towards DDU Marg, trying to shake off the stain and the thought, the city offered another lesson. Near the office building that houses The Tribune<\/i>, I saw a mother on the other side with her young child on the pavement facing Andhra School, on the very stretch meant for pedestrians. A bike and two scooters already took up much of the space. The mother opened the child\u2019s tiffin box and calmly emptied the leftovers onto the pavement: food, wrappers, and scraps, not into a dustbin or a bag but onto the public path itself, as though the street were an extension of a private bin.<\/p>\n
We speak endlessly of cleanliness. We launch campaigns and invoke the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. We put up banners, paint walls, organise drives, and post photographs of people holding brooms. But beyond optics, are we really bothered about cleanliness? Is it merely a slogan for public display, or has it entered our conscience? Have we internalised it as a civic ethic, a moral habit, a way of living in relation to others?<\/p>\n
The uncomfortable answer is no. A clean nation is not built only by municipal workers, sanitation drives, or government schemes. It is built, or destroyed, in tiny everyday acts: the spit we excuse, the wrapper we drop, the leftovers we dump, and the belief that what lies outside our homes lies outside our responsibility.<\/p>\n
The crisis lies not only in dirty roads but in a dirty civic imagination.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s streets buzz with life: vendors hawking chai, vegetables, paan masala, gutka, fish, and meat; scooters weaving through traffic; families strolling through markets. Yet pristine homes sit beside littered roads, overflowing bins, and polluted rivers. Garbage piles up along highways, rivers choke on plastic, and public toilets remain unusable. Campaigns such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan have swept public spaces, but the litter persists. The problem lies less in walls and infrastructure than in the civic sense. Often it amounts to a civilisational failure.<\/p>\n
Our approach to cleanliness is overwhelmingly visual: we prioritise what looks neat over what sustains health, ethics, and habit. India needs a clean heart, a shift in mindset in which personal discipline extends to public space. True cleanliness demands hygiene, responsibility, and internalisation, qualities absent where littering thrives just beyond the gate. Filth festers in our collective indifference as much as on the streets.<\/p>\n
The great Indian paradox<\/h3>\n
Too often we treat cleanliness as surface management: swept drawing rooms for guests, polished lobbies for clients, and freshly painted walls before inspections. Meanwhile, drains clog with untreated waste, plastic floods our rivers, and sanitation workers toil unseen.<\/p>\n
Walk into any Indian household, and floors are mopped twice a day, utensils gleam, and altars are dusted with devotion. This stems from shaucha <\/i>(cleanliness), a core principle of body-mind purity in Hinduism and yoga, emphasised in ancient texts such as the Manusmriti for spiritual progress. Yet step outside, and discipline evaporates. Streets become dumping grounds, tourist hill stations fill with plastic, and sacred rivers such as the Ganga carry our waste.<\/p>\n
Consider Mumbai\u2019s Marine Drive, famed for its seafront esplanade. On weekends it fills with joggers and selfie-takers, and it is often swept clean for VIP events or festivals. Yet a 2023 report by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation found that more than 70 per cent of the city\u2019s beaches, including nearby stretches, are littered with plastic, contributing to 1,500 tonnes of daily garbage. Residents will not toss banana peels from their balconies but discard them freely into the Arabian Sea. Cleanliness, at times, is only a way to avoid embarrassment.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/fl-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/o2abcy\/article71683427.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/_JAI0006.JPG\" "\\"A")
<\/p>\n\n
A man glances at his phone as he walks past wall art featuring Mahatma Gandhi with the \u201cSwachh Bharat\u201d slogan on Magadi Road near the Krantivira Sangolli Rayanna (Bengaluru City) railway station in Bengaluru on October 1, 2026.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n SUDHAKARA JAIN\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The numbers show the scale. The Central Pollution Control Board\u2019s 2023 annual report notes that urban India generates 62 million tonnes of solid waste a year, with only 70 per cent collected and just 31 per cent processed. In Delhi, the Municipal Corporation reported 11,000 tonnes of daily waste in 2024, much of it dumped in landfills despite repeated Swachh Bharat campaigns. Public spaces such as New Delhi railway station, Chandni Chowk, and Lodhi Gardens bear the brunt. A 2021 study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) found paan stains on 85 per cent of surveyed public walls in northern cities, while 40 per cent of urban bins overflow through improper use.<\/p>\n
Appearances deceive. Gurugram\u2019s Cyber City has spotless malls, but nearby drains spew sewage, linked to cholera outbreaks that affected 500 residents in 2023, according to Haryana health department data. The 2025 monsoon rains exposed the fa\u00e7ade of development that Gurugram boasts of.<\/p>\n
Reshma K., writing in Unnathi Views, says Indians excel at svadharma <\/i>(personal duty) but falter at sadharana dharma <\/i>(shared responsibility). A clean wall is a visible win, she argues; a clean heart demands invisible accountability. Behaviour lags: a 2022 World Bank study found that only 42 per cent of households segregate waste consistently.<\/p>\nUnderstanding civic sense<\/h3>\n
Civic sense covers waste disposal, queue-following, traffic discipline, noise control, and respect for public property. It is the behavioural infrastructure of prosperity, not mere politeness.<\/p>\n
In Japan, schools have no janitors, and children as young as six clean their classrooms. Littering in public spaces evokes personal shame there, a matter of moral and cultural responsibility rather than fear of fines. Japan also ranked first in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2024 Environmental Performance Index.<\/p>\n
One major problem is that children are rarely taught to take part in shramdaan <\/i>(voluntary physical work such as cleaning public spaces). Most schools do not make such activities a regular part of learning, and many parents are hesitant to let their children participate, which makes matters worse.<\/p>\n
India also ranks low in trust and cooperation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development\u2019s Social Capital Index. A 2019 World Bank behavioural study found that societies with stronger civic discipline spend 22-40 per cent less on infrastructure maintenance and face 30-50 per cent fewer health problems.<\/p>\n
![\"Devotees](\"https:\/\/fl-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/w9icng\/article71683400.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/PTI09_09_2022_000314A.jpg\" "\\"Devotees")
<\/p>\n\n
Devotees carry idols of Lord Ganesha for immersion in the Arabian Sea at Girgaon Chowpatty in Mumbai on September 9, 2022.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n PTI\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Poor civic habits also carry a heavy cost. According to a 2022 CSE report, pollution causes annual economic losses of around Rs.1.36 lakh crore. Traffic indiscipline is another serious problem: road accidents killed 1.72 lakh people in 2023, according to data from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.<\/p>\n
A 2025 report by Arterial magazine, \u201cThe Great Indian Disconnect: Why We Keep Our Homes Spotless and Our Streets a Mess\u201d, notes that public behaviour often worsens during festivals. During Diwali or Ganesh Visarjan, air pollution rises sharply and the Air Quality Index often crosses 400. Rivers are polluted by plaster of Paris idols, plastic, and other discarded material. Even the Kumbh Mela, despite its religious significance and large-scale management for pilgrims, produces nearly 5,000 tonnes of waste a day. The report suggests that one reason is a lingering \u201cservant mentality\u201d, a colonial-era mindset in which people came to believe that maintaining public spaces was someone else\u2019s responsibility.<\/p>\n
This is the \u201ctragedy of the commons\u201d: public space becomes someone else\u2019s problem. As the urbanist Ravi Agarwal notes in his book No Clean Drinking Water Without a Filter (2023), \u201cIndians clean for rituals but litter for convenience.\u201d Everyone claims the right to use public space, but maintenance falls to the marginalised. Sanitation workers, often from Dalit communities, bear the invisible burden. In Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s era, this was explicit untouchability; today it is a subtler disdain. A 2023 International Labour Organization report highlighted that India\u2019s four million sanitation workers face 1,000 annual deaths from hazardous cleaning, mostly manual scavenging, despite a 2013 ban.<\/p>\n
The road ahead<\/h3>\n
Gandhi saw cleanliness as self-discipline and social reform. He is widely quoted as saying, \u201cSanitation is more important than independence.\u201d During the 1946 Noakhali riots, he personally scrubbed village gutters to model dignity in labour. His radicalism challenged caste.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2014, has shifted public attention towards sanitation. According to government data, more than 100 million toilets were built by 2019, and open defecation in rural areas fell from 60 per cent to near zero. Yet a considerable gap remains. The National Commission for Safai Karamcharis has recorded 1,313 sewer and septic-tank deaths between 1993 and June 2025.<\/p>\n
Progress stalls without a shift in mindset. Gandhi wrote in Young India in 1925: \u201cA clean body cannot reside in an unclean city.\u201d India, with 1.4 billion people, cannot afford optics. Government initiatives such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan have put sanitation on the national agenda, but optics remain a trap. A celebrity holding a broom for a photo op does not change a culture. We must stop seeing cleanliness as campaigns, photographs, or one-day events. When it becomes a conscience, dirt will not merely shift from sight; it will vanish from society.<\/p>\n
Rajdeep Pathak is Programme Executive, Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti.<\/i><\/p>\n
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