The Great Hosedown

Mooh bandh, kaam chalu (No talk, just work). That’s what a bunch of volunteers in Bangalore call their campaign, one that has caught the imagination of people across the country. Groups of volunteers turn up all of a sudden at public spots and with brooms, bins, brushes and paint and other implements and material to ‘spot fix’ filthy pavements, walls, subways, garbage dumping spots and so on. Some take photographs and post them on Facebook, but many prefer to remain anonymous. The anonymity and the strategy of “no lectures, only activism”—they seem to have had some success. Groups have sprung up in Ludhiana, Kanpur, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon and several other cities. Photographs of the event are posted on social media. The homepage of The Ugly Indians (TUI)  website asks: Why are the Indian streets filthy? The answer options: a) The System, Stupid b) Corrupt Government c) Uneducated People. The answer is not any of those items. It is d) We Are All Ugly Indians. Indians are good at beating the best of systems, wherever they go, the website says. It points to how Indian settlers in Southall (London), Edison (New Jersey) and Little India (Singapore) happily defy civic rules.

The past few years have witnessed several initiatives to clean India. A Mumbai group styled as ‘The Clean Indian’ took to the streets with a water tanker, spraying high-pressure water jets at people urinating in public. The videos of men facing walls with legs apart and hands at the crotch thrown off balance and caught by surprise in the water-jet made evoked much amusement. The masked ‘Pee Shooters’, describing themselves as “anti-public urination activists”, however, evoked mixed reactions. People took it for a headline- and TV-time-grabbing stunt, not a real solution. Didn’t people pee in public because urinals were either non-existent or unusably filthy?

These initiatives could well be driven in part by the desire to be on TV or on social media and be watched. Earlier this year, a group cheekily calling itself the ‘Kaam Aadmi Party’ sprang up in Delhi and vowed to clean up the city. Photographs of volunteers with brooms cleaning up a stretch in Vasant Kunj appeared in the newspapers. But thereafter, the group seems to have been doing little beyond that south Delhi colony.

So are these media-savvy Sancho Panzas tilting at windmills? Are they truly trying to be the change they want to see? Or are they only seeking attention? The jury’s still out.