Why Swatchh Bharat Not Always Digital India?

Mahesh Vijapurkar

When one has to go, one has to go and answer the call, so I asked a ten-year-old watching a watercolourist catching an aspect of Patilpada, a hamlet of Barhanpur. He signalled with his thumb and said, “There’s a toilet there”.

“In someone’s home?”

“Yes”, he said. “There’s no water”.

It was a marvel that he understood an urban perspective of what a toilet is. Clean, and usable.

Barhanpur is about 120 kms from Mumbai, and Palghar taluk in which it falls was recently hived off from Thane district, making the Thane almost an urban district. Palghar is almost rural and tribal, and hopes to succeed because it would be small and not a part of a district. Improved focus, quicker administration is the stated purpose.

But a toilet without water? That is the bane of the several years of campaign against open defecation. These toilets may not have flush and or even adequate sceptic tanks, but by building toilets, a statistic is generated towards the campaign to make India swatchh. It is a smokes and mirrors exercise. These waterless toilets are not a feature of such villages alone. Even Mumbai has them in the slums.

Urban Indians, at least most of them, avoid using public facilities, even if they are the ones in municipal offices because they, unless they are designated facilities for the top brass, are stink spots. And sanitation is a civic duty, but who cares?

It could have been an ordeal for the hamlet when 20-odd artists descended on Patilpada with their easels and brushes to look for spots and find things to paint ‘live’. That is, on the spot. They were in a workshop conducted by brilliant watercolour Mumbai artist Amol Pawar who wants to share his skills with others who want to sharpen theirs.

It was a surprise for Barhanpur residents when suddenly a busload of artists descended on them. For two days, for 5-6 hours a day, they swarmed all over their land and courtyards, yet were cordially hosted, allowing the artists into their homes to take reference photographs or sit with the easels on their doorsteps with brushes in hand. Once the initial curiosity wore off, they went about their work, undisturbed by the invasion. They seemed to relish the fact that artists chose their hamlet. The village of which it was a part had about 4,000 souls living in it.

Would we, we asked among ourselves, allow such invasions into our housing colonies? We would have raised a hundred questions, and worried about the invasion of our privacy. Even perhaps call the police. Remember, we cannot paint railway stations on the spot. One can only photograph in stealth the reference images with the help of which further work is done. But here, they left the village to us to explore.

The second fascinating aspect was the tidiness of the village to an extent that a tissue paper used to wipe a water colour brush if thrown on the ground appeared like a sore wound. No doubt it was all mud – the dust in the foreground of each tiled home sought to be kept down by a sprinkling of cow dung in water. It was a mercy that we urban fellows did not disgrace ourselves because we picked up the stuff we could have thrown – a tissue paper used to wipe the brush, for instance, or the plastic tea cups.

There were no plastic bags or gutka pouches thrown around by the residents. It was a wonder to some of us that the hamlet could manage to be poor but clean. There was no garbage either, and the cow dung was regularly picked up before they dried up. And above all, the main but narrow road were smoother compared to our city roads. I can wager that Barhanpur stole our hearts.

One thing, however, we need to note, especially Mr Narendra Modi’s mandarins who are pushing for a digital India. Though just a couple of kilo metres off the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Highway, the area received weak signal from the cell phone towers wherever they were, and the internet did not work on the smart phone on the poor 3G coverage. In fact, closer to the Highway where we had billeted ourselves, you couldn’t even get that to call home. None bothered about the world outside beyond that. No one even noticed that there wasn’t a TV in our camping place.

Because I am a current affairs junkie, I may have missed the idiot box but others didn’t seem to. Perhaps the current affairs news – or should we concede, views as news – did not seem to interest the artists. When I asked some of my fellow participants if they missed anything, they just shrugged in disbelief that I should even ask that question. Perhaps news TV studios focus more people than the nonsense spouted by chatteratti on the nightly shows.