By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 9, 1994
I have often bristled at Western media bias in news about India. But now, I think the Western media have served India’s own long-term interests by bringing into focus the recent outbreak of pneumonic plague, a medieval disease primarily caused by poor sanitation and environmental hygiene.
It appears that the government officials, both at the federal and regional levels, were caught flat-footed in responding to the crisis. Understandably, the government went through a denial and damage-control phase. But it responded as if the plague is a public relations problem — instead of looking at it as a major public health crisis. This plague outbreak, if not quickly contained, is likely to damage India’s clout in the international political arena, her trade with neighboring countries, her tourism industry catering to travelers from overseas, her economic liberalization plans that depend on foreign capital and technology, and her self-proclaimed image as a regional superpower.
There’s a striking incongruity in India. On one hand, the country boasts of having the latest medical developments, such as kidney transplants, open-heart surgery, and MRIs. On the other hand, basic sanitation and preventive care are lacking in many places. It is frightening that one of India’s senior experts on plague, after getting admitted to a government hospital for infectious diseases with the plague acquired during his visit to Surat, left the hospital to seek medical care elsewhere.
With the eruption of the plague, several of India’s neighbors have banned air traffic with India. The international political embarrassment and regional social ostracization are far more stinging than a harsh assessment of basic problems by, say, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, overseas investors, and social workers.
Unfortunately, the people who suffer the most in this outbreak, once again, are the poor, the uneducated, the malnourished and the socially deprived. Everyone’s first reaction is to blame the government. The reality, however, is that government is not the only entity to blame. By criticizing only the government, the other important threads of the Indian social fabric are likely to get absolved of their responsibility. The plague outbreak raises questions directed not only at the federal and regional governments, but also at the educated, influential, and affluent classes of India, their value system, and priorities.
It is almost fifty years since India got freedom from Britain. It is inconceivable that India did not nationally address the basic problems associated with the lack of education among its millions – even though it is well known that education is not only the least coercive and most effective contraceptive, but also the best antidote for poor sanitation, environmental miasma, bureaucratic indifference, and political and economic exploitation.
Conveniently, overpopulation is often an explanation and an excuse for all problems in India. In one stroke, eradication of illiteracy would have reduced the severity of many of India’s problems. But then, an educated population is also likely to be troublesome to the feudal Indian political establishment.
India has one of the largest armies in the world. It is proud of indigenously developing nuclear weapons capability and missile and rocket technology. And affluent and well-educated Indians are cruising the information superhighway. With access to international cable TV, the affluent populace in India is up-to-date on world events, but indifferent to problems in its own courtyard. With so much conspicuous global access within the grasp of so few people who are affluent, influential, or powerful, it is no wonder that personal material acquisitiveness has become the major pursuit for the middle class to the exclusion of everything else.
The middle class cannot draw any satisfaction in its comparative economic and material successes when entire neighborhoods around live in deprivation. Eventually, the problems of one’s poverty-stricken neighbors become one’s own problem, in one form or other.
In any large town in India, inside the individual middle-class and blue-collar households, the ambience is quite serene with quite a few creature comforts, even though they might be Spartan by other Asian standards. Stepping outside, however, the collective indifference of the population towards public sanitation and environmental squalor is quite unsettling.
In spite of knowing the problems of overcrowding in cities in Europe and the Americas, the Indian city planners, industrialists, and big businesses made no attempt to disperse the populations from cities. In fact, after independence, cities became megacities. With no further expansion in water supply, sewage, sanitation, and other facilities, (let alone parks and open spaces), cities grew not laterally, but vertically. In many cities, single-family homes were systematically demolished to build multistory, multifamily apartments using the same civic/sanitary amenities meant for single-family households.
In this transformation, the politicians, the bureaucrats, the affluent middle class all worked hand-in-glove as abettors in crime since everybody stood to gain monetarily by fair and foul means. The societal consequences of this transformation are overcrowding, poor sanitation, and environmental hygiene.
Any train traveler between Bombay and Poona (100 miles east of Bombay) is an eyewitness – and a nosewitness as well – to the callous attitude of big Indian industries and the government towards environmental pollution: With this attitude from big industrialists, it is small wonder that smaller industries and traders took their cue from their bigger brothers in their environmental neglect and the general public became indifferent to the problem.
Ten years after independence, in spite of India having a well-nurtured trading and entrepreneurial class, the Indian government, under Jawaharlal Nehru, opened massive heavy industries, publicly financed, and bureaucratically managed, most of which lost money from the day they were started. Many state governments imitated the federal model, and started their government-owned and government-managed industries, most of which, again, are still losing money. In this misdirected endeavor, . the nation squandered three precious commodities, namely several years of time, several billions in taxpayer money, and the esprit de corps of the population in the young free India.
The government missed a great opportunity in not harnessing these resources for doing what any responsible and responsive government should do — namely, providing the roads and rails, treated water, electricity, public education, and basic health care to all. The consequences of this lost opportunity are felt even today.
Even though social problems have common features all over the globe, they are also unique in their own way. Consequently, it is necessary that the solutions, to be effective, have to come from the native soil. That is the reason why Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in spite of his European education, was effective in providing India with moral leadership, which is the foundation for all other leadership. After all, Gandhi started a whole social movement by wearing hand-spun and hand-woven cloth called Khadi. From educated Indians proudly wearing Khadi dhotis in the ’40s to clamoring for costly designer jeans in the ’90s, it is a big change, all right. But is it an improvement?
For addressing India’s many problems, India does not have to look elsewhere for inspiration. It has to go only to its own roots. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, “Whatever the noblest persons do, the ordinary man imitates. The standard they set, the ordinary men follow.” (Chapter on Karma Yoga, verse 21).
What should the affluent, the influential, and the powerful (if not the noblest) in India pursue socially, economically, and politically? What standards should they set for themselves? Their current pursuits and standards do not seem to work either for their own long-term interests or the general good, as the plague outbreak and events surrounding it clearly show. END