Do-It-Yourself street cleaning trend sweeps through India’s cities

France 24 ^ | January 5, 2015 | Satish Bhuwalka

[2ndDivisionVet]

Volunteers cleaning the streets of Raipur, India.

In cities all over India, anonymous men and women are picking up trash, fixing potholes and painting dirty walls. They’re not paid to do this; in fact, they pay for their tools themselves. These citizens are part of a growing movement of “spot-fixers”, volunteers who use their free time to clean up ugly parts of their city, and then post before-and-after pictures on social media.

While teams of volunteers like this have operated steadily in big cities like Bangalore and New Delhi for several years now, dozens more have sprung up over the past few months. Some of the newest groups say they were inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Clean India” campaign, which was launched in October. Modi called on all Indians to do their bit to keep the country clean, and specifically suggested that “if you see dirt anywhere, take a picture and upload it on social media – then take a video of yourself cleaning it and upload the photo of the clean spot”.

Old and new groups alike share a common aspect – they don’t accuse the authorities of failing to do their jobs, but instead emphasize the individual’s role in shaping their community.

“Whenever we travel and people ask us where we’re from, they say, oh, India – it’s very dirty there, isn’t it?” Satish Bhuwalka is a founding member of “Bunch of Fools”, a volunteer spot-fixing group that was founded two months ago in the city of Raipur.

I started this group with six other friends; we’re all former classmates and businessmen. Whenever we travel and people ask us where we’re from, they say, oh, India – it’s very dirty there, isn’t it? This makes us feel very bad. So we wanted to do something about it, show a different face of India to the world. And we firmly believe that keeping streets clean is every citizen’s responsibility.

Every Sunday, a group of at least 30 of us go out to different slum areas in the city to clean up garbage and fix what needs fixing, like holes in the street or sidewalk. The tools, the paint – we pay for all of it out of our pockets. We don’t ask for donations or do any fundraising, since we don’t want to be linked to any political group or organisation.

Often, the people living in the slum areas find it quite funny that we – educated businessmen – are picking up trash. They say, this isn’t your job – don’t you have more important things to do? But then we explain why we’re doing this, that the streets are important to us, and they get motivated to start cleaning too. These are usually very poor people, who can’t necessarily pay for materials, but they can pick up garbage and might then think twice about where they throw their own garbage.

Of course, not only poor people litter in India, far from it! We call ourselves ‘Bunch of Fools’ in opposition to the ‘wise’ people, which is what India's educated people are called – educated people who still throw garbage out of the windows of their cars! If they’re wise, we are the fools…

A few before-and-after shots of the "Bunch of Fools" work in Raipur:

[Carthego delenda est]

“Pretty awful, isn’t it?”

Thanks for posting that link. Lots of photos, giving an idea of the mindset of Indian culture. Dead bodies and human $hit in their drinking and bath water.

Glancing at the comments section I came across this gem:

“Actually, this is exactly how America does it, using violence to beat the Indians [Native Americans] to death, pushing the Asian, African, and poor out into the country, running the poor white people into the surrounding outskirts of the cities. America’s police are even more terrible than China’s chengguan. If you’re within two meters of a police officer, you have to raise your hands, otherwise American police have the right to shoot you dead.”

[9YearLurker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-19473368

[Carriage Hill]

The comments sections are usually better/funnier reads than most of the articles.

[jughandle]

Good for them!

[boycott]

Oh My! Oh My! Oh My!

That is brutal. I had seen pictures of the Ganges but this is far worse.

I don’t know how people can live like that. Their government is a complete failure.

[Lizavetta]

Good for them!

[Carriage Hill]

Hard to imagine much worse “living conditions” than that. I don’t know how people survive among that filth and disease, but their immune systems must be beyond hardy to endure that.