Food, drinking water, education, healthcare and sanitation are issues that governments and officials say cannot be solved in haste, but this has not prevented them from glossing over other challenges, answers to which are within reach

Shame, said the Prime Minister, that 42 per cent of Indian children are malnourished! Shame, said the Supreme Court, that thousands of children, particularly girls, are dropping out of schools because there are no toilets for them! Shame, said the Rural Development Minister, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, that absence of sanitation is the biggest blot on India!
–The Hindu, January 22, 2012.

There is too much around and about us for every Indian to be ashamed of. The Hindu could have very well have added a shame for 70 per cent adulterated milk sold and yet another shame for the 41 per cent or so of the population that goes to sleep on an empty stomach every night, or for the low quality of education in our schools, and so on and so forth. We have a national shame for every day of the week.
Food, drinking water, education, healthcare and sanitation were considered “burning issues” when I started my career 50 years ago. Today, as my career as a journalist is coming to a close, those issues are still “burning” like the abandoned coalfields of Jharia. But these were big issues which everybody thought would take a long time, big money and big effort to tackle. But, what about the many small issues that did not need great science or great technology or big money to solve? Here are a few of these juxtaposed at random to bewilder and shock the readers, though I am not sure if anybody is still shocked by such things?

Foodgrain storage
Thousands of tonnes of foodgrain stored in the open rots every year. Newspapers howl about it, TV channels cry hoarse public spirited persons shed tears and ministers make promises, but nothing happens. The earliest government report I have on this subject is from as far back as in 1885. India was then already emerging as a major wheat producing country. Again, an all-India survey resulted in a twovolume report on the subject; the first was called ‘Impurity of Indian Wheat and the Establishment of Warehouses for Storage’ and the second ‘Introduction into India of the System of Grain Elevators in Vogue in the US and in Canada’. I remember at least two other reports on building modern silos prepared when C Subramaniam and Babu Jagjivan Ram were Agricultural Ministers. I do not know where those reports lie buried or what happened to them. Many such reports have been produced and, though the Food Corporation of India can reel out statistics, the problem of lack of storage is still as endemic as it was then.

Tribal exploitation
L ike so many others of my generation, the first tribal I ever learnt about was Eklavya in the Mahabharat. What perturbed me more than 20 years later when I got an opportunity to travel in the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh was the realisation that the condition of the tribals had hardly changed in any way since Eklavya’s time. Today, the majority of tribals remain as poor, destitute, disease stricken, illiterate, oppressed and exploited as they must have been a hundred or a thousand years ago. Perhaps, they have fared much worse during the last 63 years of Independence than they did during the long British rule.

The first UN State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples’ Report two years ago noted that “on UNDP’s Human Poverty Index ranking of countries, “indigenous communities in India are comparable to sub-Saharan nations which are ranked in the bottom 25…” As a newspaper reporter, I have seen for many years politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen fatten on minerals and timber extracted from tribal areas and tribals themselves being impoverished. Every project for India’s economic development has uprooted the tribals from their homes and left them more impoverished and brutalised. The rise of the Naxal movement has made their conditions worse. The Naxals have provided yet another reason to governments and businesses to accelerate their economic ruin in the name of development. Again, hundreds of government reports, studies, development plans have been written, numerous election promises and homilies delivered only to see their condition get worse with time.

Slum clearance and rehabilitation, JJ colony re-settlement and several other such and similar phrases have become an integral part of the vocabulary of urban India and have remained there, with no concrete action plan in place to improve the situation.

Urban slums
lum clearance, slum rehabilitation, JJ colony re-settlement and several other such and similar phrases became an integral part of the vocabulary of urban India a long time ago. There is no prime minister, chief minister, or any other state functionary who has not spoken on the issue at one time or the other and pledged to change the face of urban India. The very idea of clearing slums and rehabilitating slum-dwellers was and is stupid. In the name of rehabilitation, people are removed far away from their work places where they are asked to live without drinking water, electricity, sanitation and cheap transport. China faced the same problem but very early on in their planning they realised that it was not possible to provide new housing to all. So, they decided that they would make existing slums liveable by providing water, power, healthcare, education and sanitation—and they did that. On our part, we adopted a lofty but unrealisable plan and the results are there for all to see.

Public toilets
T he toilet story is the real story of India. The Hindu was so telling, so succinct, and so trenchant about it that I do not need to add anything. The story has been told so many times by Indians, NRIs and foreigners that it has lost the sting that such stories usually have. Men standing in rows along city walls piddling poodles of urine and shaking droplets off their willies in the middle of busy marketplaces as school children and young women pass by. Travelling on the Deccan Queen one winter day, I saw a long line of villagers walking in the early morning mist, waving bottles of water looking for a suitable perch to sit at ease. “The batliwallas,” said someone, “have become so bold they don’t hesitate to sit close to the passing trains.” What happened to all those promises to build toilets for all?.