SWACCH BHARAT ABHIYAN GIVING WINGS TO BAPU’S DREAM OF CLEAN INDIA

It will be a stock-taking exercise for the government when India celebrates Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary this year as it will also mark the completion of three years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship cleanliness drive – the “Swacch Bharat Abhiyan”. The Modi government has set an ambitious target of Open Defecation Free India by October 2, 2019 when Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary will be celebrated.

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Given the giant strides made in a short span of three years, the government seems headed towards meeting the 2019 deadline of providing toilets to every household. Under the Swachh Bharat campaign, more than 4.90 crore toilets have already been constructed since October 2, 2014. According to Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, more than 2.44 lakh villages have been declared open defecation free and 203 open defecation free districts as on September 24, 2017. What makes the programme noteworthy is that several public sector as well as private institutions have joined hands with the government to make it a grand success. Many business houses have adopted several villages in this connection under the Corporate Social Responsibility. It is no surprising then that the country’s sanitation coverage has leapfrogged to more than 68 per cent compared to just 38 per cent in 2012. But still much more needs to be done.

Keeping this in view, the government has launched a fortnight long 'Swachhta Hi Seva' (Cleanliness is Service) campaign which will culminate on Gandhi Jayanti next month. Under the campaign, several programmes have been planned to give a fillip to the nationwide cleanliness drive. The purpose is to reinvigorate the “Swacch Bharat Abhiyan” which was started as a national movement three years ago. The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, which is spearheading the campaign, has been joined by various other ministries, government departments and non-government organizations to spread the awareness of cleanliness.

October 2, 2014 will go down in the history books as the biggest campaign for “Swachh Bharat” when Prime Minister Modi himself wielded a broom and swept the dirty streets of New Delhi. The people responded to his clarion call to join him in this endeavour to give a fitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, who wanted to make sanitation a priority for India more than a century ago. The campaign aims to end the wide-spread practice of open defecation, build more toilets and improve waste management, among other goals.

While underlining the importance of cleanliness, the Prime Minister has often said that the idea of Swachh Bharat has nothing to do with politics, as it is inspired by patriotism. One is reminded of Gandhi’s saying that “Sanitation is more important than independence.”

While the father of the nation championed the cause of self-service in cleanliness and end the despicable practice of untouchability, the movement faltered after his death. Though several programmes were undertaken since then by several governments, it is a sad commentary that the twin issues of sanitation and untouchability continue to haunt the country even almost 70 years  after Bapu’s death.

Poor sanitation leads to several health-related diseases and untimely deaths. A charity organization “WaterAid” had painted a grim situation in one of its reports in 2014. It had then reported that less than a third of India’s 1.2 billion people had access to sanitation and more than 186,000 children under the age of five used to die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation.  It has its economic pitfalls also. It is estimated that the country is losing 6.4 percent of GDP annually as poor access to sanitation results in diseases and deaths. But all that is set to change now as various government agencies are working on war footing to meet the challenge.

Quoting the World Health Organization, the Prime Minister has said in the past that an average of Rs. 6,500 per person is lost in India due to lack of cleanliness and hygiene. He said Swachh Bharat would therefore make a significant impact on public health, and in safeguarding income of the poor, ultimately contributing to the national economy. He said sanitation should not be seen as a political tool, but should only be connected to patriotism (rashtrabhakti) and commitment to public health.

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which carried out a survey to estimate the cost of benefits of the Swachh Bharat Mission, has in a recent report said one rupee invested in improving sanitation helps save Rs 4.30. It said that each household could save Rs. 50,000 every year if there is Open Defecation Free society because the medical costs will come down, the value of time savings and the value of mortality will be averted. It also said the benefits are highest for the poorest quantile of the population.

But to make the programme successful, the Modi government will need to redouble efforts to create more awareness and educate people to change their age-old attitudes towards hygiene and purity. There is still widespread belief in the hinterland that it is unclean to defecate inside and that only “untouchable” low cases should deal with excrement.

Until and unless there is a change in the mindset of the people, the programme can’t be a success. The government and business houses may construct toilets, but one needs to draw people out from the open fields to the confines of a toilet in order to realize the full health and economic benefits of sanitation. In the interiors, a large section of the people still prefers open defecation even though they have functional toilets at home. This is because they consider it to be more comfortable and convenient. In such a scenario, there is an urgent need to educate people through awareness campaigns to help eliminate such negative notions. The success of the programme will be largely dependent on people’s participation. It is therefore imperative that people rise to the occasion to make India clean and healthy.

WILL CHINA WALK THE TALK ON TERROR?

Unpredictability seems to be the mantra of China’s foreign policy. To everyone’s surprise, China joined hands with the four other BRICS nations recently naming militant groups based in Pakistan as a security concern in the region and sought decisive action against them. It not only shocked Pakistan, but baffled foreign policy experts in China as well. Because it represented a marked departure from China’s long-standing approach towards militant groups active in Pakistan. In the past, China had stonewalled all efforts to censure Pakistan-based militant groups. Therefore, China being party to the Xiamen Declaration, calling upon the international community to establish a "genuinely broad" international counter-terrorism coalition, was something unexpected.

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Expectedly, there was a sense of disbelief and unease in Pakistani establishment. The next day Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan categorically rejected the statement and said no terrorist organization had any complete safe havens and was operating freely inside Pakistan. But its nervousness was palpable. The government decided to rush Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif to Beijing.

And lo! China sprang another surprise. Within days of BRICS leaders demanding that patrons of militant groups based in Pakistan be held to account, China extolled Pakistan’s role in the fight against terrorism. Soon after meeting his Pakistani counterpart, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi had this to say at a press conference. "The government and people of Pakistan have made huge sacrifices in the fight against terrorism and such efforts and sacrifices are there for everyone to see," adding “the international community should recognise that... and give Pakistan the full credit it deserves."

By revisiting its position on Pakistan’s involvement in terror activities twice in four days, China has only managed to send confusing signals to the international community about its intent to walk the talk on terror.

If China were to give a clean chit to Pakistan, then why did it agree to sign the Xiamen Declaration in the first place? China has always come to the defence of Pakistan whenever India tried to isolate it at various international fora. It has repeatedly rebuffed India’s attempt to get the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammad Masood Azhar added to a U.N. blacklist of groups linked to al Qaeda. India has accused the JeM and its top leader, Masood Azhar, of masterminding several attacks, including a deadly assault on an Indian air base in January last year. Six Indian soldiers and five gunmen who stormed the Pathankot airbase were killed.

The political pundits were also baffled as the Xiamen Declaration came within days of India and China agreeing to defuse a crisis over Doklam where the forces of the two countries were engaged in a dispute for more than two months. Given the bitter rhetoric the two countries were involved in, it was nothing more than a surprise that China agreed to name several terror groups based in Pakistan. The groups named in the declaration included Taliban, (Islamic State)..., Al-Qaeda and its affiliates including Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, TTP and Hizb ut-Tahrir. Other than Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the groups named in the declaration are engaged in terror activities both in Kashmir as well as in Afghanistan. Both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad are anti-India groups based in Pakistan and have routinely carried out militant attacks in Kashmir and elsewhere in the country. Indian investigating agencies have blamed LeT for the deadly terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008 in which at least 166 people were killed and hundreds others wounded. JeM is accused of masterminding the audacious attack on Indian Parliament in 2001.

The censure of the groups came as a rude shock to Pakistan which was rattled by US President Donald Trump who singled out it for harbouring militants fighting against US military forces in Afghanistan. In a televised speech last month, Trump came down heavily on Pakistan as a fickle ally while announcing a new policy on Afghanistan. In the last few years, the relations between the United States and Pakistan have muddied and Washington has linked its military aid to Islamabad on its commitment to take action against the Haqqani network militants. The US has often accused Pakistan of hosting Haqqani group militants who are helping the Taliban in launching attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistan denies the accusation and portrays itself to be the biggest victim of terrorism claiming that it has suffered more than 60,000 casualties since 2001. Pakistan’s claims that Afghan Taliban militants do not enjoy a safe haven on its soil flew in the face last year when the then adviser to the Prime Minister on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, admitted that Islamabad had considerable influence over the Taliban because its leaders live in the country.

What added to discomfiture of Islamabad was the inclusion of Pakistan-based Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which China accuses it of fomenting trouble in Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur people. In the last two years, hundreds have died in unrest in Xinjiang. China has often pressured Pakistan to take action against Uighur militants who are believed to be hiding in a tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

Beijing is also facing heat back home after the abduction and killing of a Chinese couple in southwestern Pakistan. The Chinese were outraged as the killing came at a time when Beijing was pumping billions of dollars under the One Belt, One Road initiative, also known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, in Pakistan. Earlier also, several Chinese engineers involved in the project have been attacked and abducted, and later released by militants active in the restive Balochistan. There is apprehension among the people in the restive Balochistan, the resource-rich province of Pakistan, that the project will change the demography of the region and reduce the locals to minority in their homeland. The killings, though claimed by the Islamic State, led to souring of ties between the two countries.

Pakistan faces a diplomatic dilemma. The BRICS declaration, in a way, has supported India’s stand that Pakistan-based terror outfits pose a serious threat to regional security and that the world cannot afford to have double standards in the fight against terror. Washington has for long been ticking off Islamabad for not doing enough against militants ensconced there. Now with China also expressing its concern about JeM and LeT, the pressure on Pakistan to act against these groups is likely to build. However, it remains to be seen whether China will really put pressure on Pakistan to act against the terror groups active in Kashmir and Afghanistan. China’s flip-flops within a week on the issue do not inspire much confidence. 

DEMONETISATION SINKS INDIAN ECONOMY, FOR NOW

Well, the numbers tell the story. The government data has demonized the demonetization, which was touted as the panacea for all the ills, affecting the economy as was the country’s internal security. The country’s economic growth slipped to a three-year low in the last quarter. The 5.7 per cent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the last quarter (April-June), the slowest since the January-March quarter 2014, is a matter of serious concern.  What is most shocking is that the economy grew at a healthy 7 per cent in the fiscal third quarter last year despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s out-of-the-blue decree to withdraw high denomination bank notes.

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The Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures came as a double whammy for the government as a day earlier the Reserve Bank of India said in its annual report that all but one per cent of the estimated 15.4 trillion rupees of demonetized bank notes had returned to the banking system. This was a big setback as the government had sniffed windfall gains expecting that between 2 to 3 lakh crore rupees would never return to the banking system. To the contrary, the so-called black money, on which the government had planned surgical strike, became legit. This raises a serious question on the intent of the government.

Why I say so? The government invalidated 500 and 1000 rupee notes on the surmise that the large denomination currency notes were being used to stockpile black money and evade tax. If one buys the government theory, then it defies all logic when it introduced even a bigger currency note of Rs 2,000. Which is the larger denomination currency – a 1,000 rupee currency note or a 2,000 rupee currency note? Won’t it be easier to stash black money in the form of 2,000 rupee notes than the 1,000 rupee notes? Therefore, the government’s reasoning is far from the truth. This is no way one can stop generating black money. One can draw only two plausible conclusions behind this exercise. Either the government was ill-advised or it was a deliberate attempt to convert the alleged black money into white.

The jury is still out whether the economy has bottomed out. No one knows for sure where the economy will gather steam from here onwards. For, the first quarter of the current fiscal presents dismal picture. The private consumption has seen a dip of 0.6 percent at 6.7 per cent. The continuing woes of cash crunch and massive job loss are seen as main villains behind the falling consumption. Almost all sectors, with the exception of services, have shown deceleration.  The agriculture sector, which was showing signs of revival in the last quarter of 2016-17 with 5.2 per cent growth, slumped to 2.3 per cent. So is the industry sector which registered a decline of 1.5 per cent in the same period.  Sentiment remains depressed in mining, manufacturing and construction sectors even nine months after Mr. Modi declared the high currency value notes as illegal accounting for 86 per cent of the currency in circulation. The manufacturing sector took the maximum hit which slowed to 1.2 percent in the June quarter from a 10.7 percent growth last year. The only silver lining is Services which registered a growth of 1.5 per cent compared to the last quarter of 2016-17.

It now becomes clear that demonetization is proving to be “monumental mismanagement” as the former Prime Minister and eminent economist Dr Manmohan Singh had predicted during his speech in parliament. He had termed the move “organized loot and legalized plunder” drawing sharp opposition from the treasury benches. One hopes his warning that "For those saying this is good in the long run, it reminds me of John Keynes' words, 'In the long run we are all dead” does not turn out to be true.

With economy in complete mess, let’s now focus on other key areas which Prime Minister Modi cited during his famous November 8 address to the nation. While comparing demonetization to a “mahayagna”, Mr. Modi said it would purify the country from corruption, black money, fake notes and terrorism.  The latest Transparency International report released on September 1 has dubbed India as the most corrupt Asian country. With a bribery rate of 69 per cent, India leads the dubious list. In fact, our neighbor Pakistan fares better than us. As far as black money is concerned, how much of it is left in the hands of individuals, the RBI report has wisened us. The fake new currency notes continue to be printed across the border and smuggled into India as several government agencies have seized them from time to time. With regard to terrorism, the less said the better. The terrorism related incidents have only spiked in Kashmir since then. In fact, the new 2,000 currency notes were recovered from one of the slain militants in Kashmir within a week of their introduction.

In a nutshell, the move to demonetize higher currency notes does not seem to have the desired results as the government had tom-tommed. The country is still struggling to come out of the shock which has caused more pain than gain.