ALTHOUGH NEWLY-ELECTED prime minister Narendra Modi has blindspots and several deep prejudices which could abort his ambitious plans to develop laggard India into an economic super-power, there™s no denying he™s got his priorities right. Hard on the heels of his maiden Independence Day (August 15) speech emphasising the importance of clean and useable toilets, particularly for girl children, on October 2 (Mahatma Gandhi™s birth anniversary) he launched a national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (clean India campaign), picking up the broom himself and symbolically sweeping the neglected alleys of a slum colony in Delhi. Yet it will take more than mere resolve of the prime minister and photo-op symbolism to clean up the accumulated mess of the past 67 years since the country imprudently adopted the Soviet-style centrally planned socio-economic development model which has patently failed. Mounds of garbage, filth, plastic waste, and untreated sewage poisoning the country™s rivers and groundwater is being generated on a daily basis by a population which has tripled in six decades ” because of foolish neglect of primary education and healthcare. Certainly if the clean India movement is driven by the superficial causes of filth, dirt and inevitable diseases which threaten to overwhelm the nation, cleaning up the country is likely to prove a Sisyphean endeavour. But it can succeed if first, there™s candid acknowledgement that the vast majority of citizenry is ignorant of the importance of aesthetics, hygiene, and health, because the country™s prescribed syllabuses in primary, secondary, and higher education are faulty. Seven decades after independence, it™s painfully clear these values were not ” and are not ” integrated into the bloodstream of the education system. Therefore, there™s urgent need to ensure that genuine educationists rather than political cronies, debate and develop school and collegiate syllabuses transparently. Another initiative which requires serious attention to halt accumulative growth of the muck glacier which is slowly suffocating the citizenry, is implementation of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution which moot wide administrative powers in elected village panchayats (councils) and municipal governments down to the ward level. These 1993 constitutional amendments are a dead letter because of the obstinate refusal of state governments to respect their decentralisation objectives. Self-evidently, the proper authorities for supervising waste disposal and maintenance of hygiene in municipal wards are locally elected committees of householders with a stake in property value appreciation. Moreover, a major share of property taxes should be determined and collected in each ward by locally elected committees and shared with state governments as is normative in most OECD countries. In short, if it™s not to dissipate into mere symbolism, the Swachh Bharat campaign needs deeper analysis and commitment to curricular reform and decentralised governance. Nobel prize and indictment THE ANNOUNCEMENT MADE on October 10 by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee conferring the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 jointly upon Pakistan-born Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi of India œfor their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to…
