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Clean India campaign is yet to address casteism

It's not a spectre that is haunting India. It’s a tangible, evil-smelling, health-impairing, socially divisive reality: waste. India’s battle with “waste”, now led by the dashing sowars of swachh Bharat, faces two formidable obstacles unique to India. The first is magnitude. No other country in the world (excluding islands and city-states) has so great a population density, coupled with the capacity to produce so much discarded “stuff”.

True, China has more people, but China is larger than India. Population density in China is about 150 people to the square kilometre; in India, it is closer to 450. The United states produces more waste—250 million metric tonnes a year, according to one estimate. This greatly exceeds estimates of India’s annual production of 65 million tonnes. But the Us has more room to dump it: only 35 people to the sq km. Bangladesh has a greater population density, but with nowhere near India’s industrial capacity to dig things up, throw things away and manufacture all the pollution-creating components of 21st-century life.

Appropriate technologies and adaptive policies can overcome many problems of magnitude. But India’s other unique obstacle to a cleaner environment is much tougher. It is caste: the idea that people are born to the task of doing the nation’s dirty work. As Bhasha singh writes in her powerful book Unseen, “the caste system aids the belief that all work associated with filth is the lot of the Dalits.”