Fifth column by Tavleen Singh: Misplaced priorities or wrong priorities

What has gone wrong with Indian policy-making that we have not yet succeeded in giving our citizens this basic facility?

It was from a two-paragraph story, on an obscure inside page of a newspaper last week, that I learned that only forty-six out of four hundred and eighty-five Indian cities supply citizens with clean drinking water. This is an official figure from a government report. It drew my attention because I am always puzzled about why it is things like the denial of clean water to our citizens that do not become the biggest issues at election time. Why do we in the mighty Indian media think these issues are so inconsequential that we bury this kind of story on inside pages? Why does political wrangling and seat-sharing seem so much more important that they make endless dreary headlines?

Clean water is a need so fundamental that in countries that are truly ‘developed’ you can drink the water that comes out of the taps in your home. What has gone wrong with Indian policy-making that we have not yet succeeded in giving our citizens this basic facility? It is not just our poorest citizens who are deprived of clean water. We all are. Those who can afford the filters needed to clean the filthy water that municipalities supply, get them. But for rural Indians and those who live in urban slums, this is a luxury they cannot afford. The result is that more than 5,000 children die in India every day from diarrhea caused by dirty water. Why is this not the biggest issue in the coming general election?

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By coincidence, it was just after reading that story about how few Indians have access to clean water that I happened to catch a clip of the Prime Minister campaigning in West Bengal. He was greeted by shrill cries of “Modi, Modi, Modi” that went on for so long, he had to stop his speech and smile in gratitude. He said that he must have done many good deeds in past lives to get so much love from the people and that he would not betray their love. He would return it by ‘guaranteeing’ that India would become a developed country someday soon. In fairness to Modi, he has tried harder than any of the Prime Ministers who came before him to make these supposedly small issues into big ones.

It is because he drew attention to the horrors of open defecation that the Swachh Bharat campaign began and because of it that rural sanitation improved hugely. But he then moved onto new promises and selling new dreams and forgot that our rivers, lakes and other waterways, continue to remain dangerously polluted by raw sewage and poisonous industrial waste.

Having just spent a week driving around Sri Lanka, I can report that between Colombo and Anuradhapura, and between there and Kandy, I came across no visible garbage except in one hill town. For the rest, I was amazed by the spotless villages, small towns and bazaars I drove through. And I marveled at how pristine the lakes were and how wonderfully clean the temples were. Sri Lanka is much, much poorer than India. If they can achieve ‘swachhata’, why can we in

India not?

Other questions came to mind on my travels. Of these, literacy was the most troubling. If Sri Lanka, despite decades of war and political turmoil, can achieve a literacy rate of 92%, why does India lag shamefully at 72%? Reliable NGO surveys report that even this statistic is more mythical than true. When they conduct their own studies, they find that Indian children leave school without ever learning basic mathematics and reading. Our real problem is not unemployment, but unemployability. But again, these are things that our political leaders prefer not to talk about. Their own children never go to government schools. And the children of high officials go only to the best private schools so that they can get admission to the finest American universities.

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Last week came the happy news that the economy has grown at 8.4% in the last quarter. Modi has ‘guaranteed’ that when he wins a third term, he will ensure that the Indian economy races ahead even faster. And it is true that in a time when the world is in the grip of wars in Europe and the Middle East, it is remarkable that the Indian economy has been insulated from these uncertainties. What worries me when I see the images from Gaza is that the thousands of displaced people living without clean water and basic hygiene are not much worse off than millions of Indians.

Something has gone very wrong with our priorities. Not so much in the past ten years but in past decades. In the past ten years, the reality is that there has been improvement in the choice of our priorities. Modi may not have achieved the standards of sanitation and clean water that he set before us, but he has tried. We must hope that if he wins a third term he will try harder still and not distract from these priorities by reverting to what has memorably been described as the ‘opium of the masses’.

What point is there in building grand new highways and airports, and aiming to land four Indians on the Moon, if we cannot provide our citizens with their most basic needs? As for us in the media, we should be ashamed for always putting political slugfests above more important things.