Cleaning House

Summers at home in India pass in a precarious time warp. I can fax, chat on the net or make a cell-phone call abroad but when I walk over to my nephew's house, only a mile and a half away in a rural campus, my journey has a Victorian arduousness to it. I have to pick my way gingerly through the dusty path cutting across the field, alert for dozing vipers, lantana thorns, cantankerous goats tethered to the bushes, and random puddings of animal and human excreta. At first, it is a mystery where these come from because the villages are a good bit away. But distance does not dim the force of the NIMBY (not in my backyard) sentiment, which until recent years has been the motto of Indian civic life.

And so houses are walled and gated here without apology. Our wall, solid grey and concrete, was supposed to have been a formidable seven and a half feet, but it sank to six after it was built. Still it's not enough. A neighbor's son shins up a tree on their side, leans over, and plucks the mangos on our side. Every so often, cricket balls, clods of earth, stones, and other less identifiable flying objects land on the lawn that my parents weed and cut every week with missionary zeal. Across from our house on an empty piece of land, someone's garbage shows up with mysterious regularity no matter how often we clear it. Waste water from the gutters spills over onto the streets every time it rains. Little ones and sometimes not so little ones wander off into the fields to relieve themselves with a certain innocent nonchalance. But the houses from which they saunter out, though they encroach on the streets far beyond the prescribed limits, are themselves immaculately clean, the earth in front swept, washed, and decorated with ritual white-powder kolams.

Cultural factors underlie problems exacerbated by over-population and poverty. The cities of an early Indian civilization in the Indus River valley had complex sewer systems and some of the oldest extant toilets that date back 4,500 years. But over time, Hindu religious teachings forbidding defecation near dwelling places as dirty and polluting to one's caste made the cleaning of "night-soil" (the Indian euphemism) the work of "untouchables."

Until Exnora came here, my parents, retired medical professors, were fighting a losing battle with community sanitation, unable to get neighbors to cover open ditches or to dispose of their garbage on their own property. Now, my father tells me, the Exnora man comes by on his cycle every week to collect the garbage sorted out before hand into recyclables and wet waste which they compost to provide cheap, high-quality manure which is used among other things to reforest the denuded pre-Cambrian hills that ring the campus. The municipality has talked of greening for years, but only Exnora, an NGO, had actually taken any steps.

An acronym for Excellent Novel and Radical, Exnora is the brainchild of M. B. Nirmal, a bank official turned civic activist who founded it in 1989 to clean up Chennai, capital of the southern state Tamil Nadu and the fourth largest metropolis in India, which was disintegrating under massive problems of pollution and sanitation.

Almost a third of India lives in a city and in the major cities about half of the population is concentrated in slums. Lack of sanitation accounts for 80 percent of Indian health problems -- from polio, of which half the world's reported cases occur in India, to diarrhea which kills half a million children annually, that is, as many children who have died from sanctions in Iraq in a decade.

In Chennai, a study by Exnora shows that one crucial reason for the unsanitary conditions in the city is that over 267 million liters per day of sewerage is discharged into the city's waterways because the sewage pumping-stations and treatment plants are not functioning properly. According to experts, sewerage-connected toilets remain out of the reach of the majority of Indians primarily because the sewerage system needs not only a sufficient quantity of running water, but also a regular supply of water for waste disposal, the cost of which at the rate of $150 a unit would be $500 billion. Right now, there are no sewerage and sanitation services for more than half the population living in cities. Toilets are not available to about a third of urban residents and proper waste collection services have yet to reach almost three quarters of the population.