#
Did you know that Parsis in Mumbai, instead of being left at the Tower of Silence after
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they die, are now cremated?
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Because a cow fell sick in the early 1990s.
#
Did you know that the smog in Delhi is caused by something that farmers in Punjab do, and
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that there's no way to stop them?
#
Did you know that there wasn't one gas tragedy in Bhopal, but three?
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One of them was seen, but two were unseen.
#
Did you know that many well-intentioned government policies hurt the people they're supposed
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Why was demonetization a bad idea?
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How should GST have been implemented?
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Why are all our politicians so corrupt when not all of them are bad people?
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I'm Amit Verma, and in my weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, I take a shot at
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answering all these questions and many more.
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I aim to go beyond the seen and show you the unseen effects of public policy and private
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I speak to experts on economics, political philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and constitutional
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law so that their insights can blow not only my mind, but also yours.
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The Seen and the Unseen releases every Monday.
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So do check out the archives and follow the show at seenunseen.in.
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You can also subscribe to The Seen and the Unseen on whatever podcast app you happen
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And now let's move on to the show.
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One of the great dilemmas of politics is the question of when a politician finally comes
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to power, does his focus shift to governance, or does it stay with politics?
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Does he try to do a good job running the country, or does he simply focus on what will get him
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In an ideal democracy, you might imagine that this is a false choice.
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Surely a politician in power has to provide good governance to stay in office, right?
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Well, not in our democracy, where there is so little connect between power and accountability.
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Firstly, many good governance decisions will show results many years down the road, well
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beyond the electoral horizon, and the politician has no incentive to make them now.
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The deeper structural changes with their delayed and invisible benefits, for which no one man
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will get credit, will not attract the politician, but the immediate sops or handouts, which
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look good but perpetuate the problem, will be more attractive to him.
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Secondly, we live in an age where narrative is all-powerful.
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We all live in a world inside our heads that often bears no connection to the real world
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This is enabled and amplified by social media.
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The most important skill for a politician, therefore, is to shape these narratives and
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And that is why it is no surprise that a politician as skilled as Narendra Modi cares more about
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optics than about governance.
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One example of this, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Badma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan sounds amazing, but it's a classic example of a government
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scheme whose intentions are noble, but whose outcomes are dismal.
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To explain why this is so, I have as a guest on this episode, Shruti Rajgopalan, a constitutional
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economist who teaches economics at Purchase College in New York, and who has been an old
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friend and a frequent guest on this show.
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I recorded this episode a few weeks ago when I was experimenting with this new format of
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chatting a little bit with my guests about themselves before we got to the subject at
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I've since stopped this practice because listeners gave me feedback that they preferred
#
it if we just got to the point.
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But still, this is one of those old recordings from that phase.
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I enjoyed our entire conversation, but before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial
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If this happens to be the only podcast you listen to, well, you need to listen to some
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Check out the ones from IVM Podcasts who co-produce this show with me.
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Go to ivmpodcasts.com or download the IVM app, and you'll find a host of great Indian
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podcasts that cover every subject you could think of.
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From the magazine I edit, Pragati, I think, pragati.com, there is the Pragati Podcast
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hosted by Hamsini Hariharan and Pawan Srinath.
#
There is a brilliant Hindi podcast, Puliya Baazi, hosted by Pranay Kutasane and Saurabh
#
All the podcasts from these policy podcasts, IVM, has shows that cover music, films, finance,
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sports, sci-fi, tech, and the LGBT community, all under one roof, or rather, all in one
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So download the IVM Podcasts app today.
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Shruti, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Shruti, by now you're familiar with the custom on the show that I start off by asking the
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guest some questions about themselves so that listeners can get to know them better.
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And last time when we spoke to you, you spoke about your love for economics and law and
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what drew you to becoming an economist, and I want to sort of ask what is a follow-up
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question to that, which is that, you know, I've known you for over 10 years, and one
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thing that is safe to say and that will be obvious to listeners who've heard your previous
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episodes is that economics is not just a profession for you or something that you've studied.
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You are deeply, passionately in love with economics the way some people are with, say,
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So was there a specific moment or an aha moment in your life where things changed for you?
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You looked at the world differently because of economics and realized that this was what
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I think I, you know, if I had to have one aha moment, I had a fantastic professor in
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the U in my second year.
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His name is, now he's retired, he's Professor Anil Kukradi, and just like, you know, one
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of the kindest people I know and just a really remarkable teacher, and for the first time
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I remember in his class, for me, like the world kind of came into sharp focus.
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You know how when you wear glasses and you go to the eye doctor, they keep putting different
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lenses on you and it's all hazy and bright and then suddenly the world comes into focus
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and you can read those letters.
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So that sort of happened to me when I was a student at DU.
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He was just an incredible professor.
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The other part of it was just reading.
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You know, I loved economics so much, I read broadly, I read well outside the curriculum,
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the DU curriculum was quite sad.
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So I read a lot and I think we underestimate how important simple economic texts are.
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So Henry Hazlitt and his economics in one lesson made a big impression, right?
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Similarly Thomas Sowell's work has made a huge impact in how I think about the world.
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Frederick Bastiat would be another example, you know, just people who write complex economic
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concepts in a simple and very enjoyable way and slowly I started seeing economics in everything.
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The other thing is I'm trained at George Mason, which is a particular tradition in economics,
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you know, in terms of public choice, Austrian economics and things like that.
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But one thing at George Mason, I don't know if it's in the water or the air, everyone
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just lives and reads economics in that department.
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We see economics in everything, right?
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From marriage markets to betting markets to political markets, everything is an incentive
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So I guess I found my people and this is what I discussed all the way through grad school
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and after a point, you know, when you do something enough, when you read enough, it just becomes
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a way of thinking and people who are close to me, my friends, my family, they often make
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fun of me that I just sort of see economics in everything.
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But I don't know if it's a switch that I can turn off now.
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I think it's been switched on and might stay like this for a long time.
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No, and I mean economics is a study of human behavior.
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So economics is in everything except maybe outer space.
#
So if an enthusiastic listener of these episodes was to ask that, hey, economics sounds very
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interesting and the economic way of looking at the world is something that, you know,
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I want to understand better.
#
And can you recommend, say, three books or five books, which can help me do that?
#
Like what are those three books I should take with me to a holiday resort and lock myself
#
up with and I'll come out a different person looking at the world through clear lenses?
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What would you recommend?
#
So I would definitely recommend Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.
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Like that is a beginner's textbook.
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I think anybody can read it.
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It doesn't matter whether you've had any background in economics or social sciences before this.
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That would be a good place to start.
#
Same, pick up any book by Thomas Sowell.
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Yeah, I'll interject here and point out that Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt,
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one of my favorite books as well, is based on an essay by Frederick Bastia, inspired
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by an essay by Frederick Bastia called That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen.
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Which is also the inspiration for this podcast because that magnificent essay and it's free
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online so just do a Google search, That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen and sort
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So I don't want to reduce economics only to incentive analysis and the analysis of unintended
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I think economics is very powerful compared to any other discipline in pointing out what
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are these unintended or unseen effects and I don't think any other discipline comes close.
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It's like having a superpower, you know.
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So I really strongly urge everyone to read both Frederick Bastia, the essay that Amit
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mentioned and after which the podcast is named, and also Henry Hazlitt's book.
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And moving on from there, you were mentioning Thomas Sowell.
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Yeah, I would say pick up anything by Thomas Sowell.
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He's sort of like, I think the core of good economic ideas is there in pretty much anything
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he writes, but he's also someone who's able to see the big picture very clearly.
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So there's a lot of politics.
#
There's a lot of culture.
#
There's a lot of history included in how he sees things and the way he writes.
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So I would definitely recommend him.
#
If you're not much into reading and you like videos or interviews and podcasts and things
#
like that, I would say Amit's podcast is a good place to start.
#
Econ Talk, which Russ Roberts does, is a great place to start.
#
Marginal Revolution universities.
#
These are former professors of mine at George Mason, Tyler Cowan and Alex Tabarrok, who
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really don't need any preface or introduction.
#
They do some fantastic videos.
#
Their book is really good.
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I use their textbook to teach.
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So these would be like the principles level things.
#
I would also say, you know, reading a couple of great essays, I think the Use of Knowledge
#
in Society by Hayek is one of the finest essays I have read on really understanding how the
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Same thing, you know, James Buchanan wrote a fantastic essay called Politics Without
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Romance and Introduction to Public Choice and Constitutional Economics.
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And I can provide links for both of them, Amit, and you can just put them up.
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Those are really good sources.
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We'll have them at the bottom of this episode.
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In fact, the Use of Knowledge in Society, in my opinion, is what I keep telling people
#
is one of the two great essays of the 20th century.
#
Now let's see how well you know me.
#
Can you guess which is the other one on my list?
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The Candlemakers Petition?
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The other one has nothing to do with economics, so I must tell you.
#
But you'll say aha when I tell you.
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Yeah, but I'm so one dimensional.
#
I don't know if I know things outside of economics that you read so broadly.
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You don't know me at all.
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I don't think I would be able to guess.
#
It's Politics in the English Language by George Orwell.
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That's a fantastic essay.
#
That's a remarkable essay.
#
And both of those, by the way, on the site I added, Pragati at thinkpragati.com, we have
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a section called Historia, where every month we put up one historic essay, which over the
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past months has included the Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek, which is such a masterpiece
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of an essay, Politics in the English Language by George Orwell and the essay by B.R. Ambedkar
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that moved you so much and that you referred to in our episode about caste, which is when
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I decided to look it up because to my shame, I hadn't read that yet.
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And then we put it up on the site.
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So do check out Historia.
#
You know, I just think Ambedkar is one of the one of the best communicators I have read.
#
I'm a really big fan of Ambedkar.
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Our economics and politics don't always align, but I have never come away from reading Ambedkar
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without learning anything.
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And I think he's the most underappreciated of our framers when it comes to actually reading
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Like he's there in every statue at every street corner.
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But I do think we need just Ambedkar to be widely read.
#
So let me ask you a question this time for my own edification rather than my listeners,
#
which is a genuine question I have, which is that Ambedkar's body of work is just immense
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And it's very common for people to say that you can if you read all of his work, you can
#
find justifications for anything in some part of his work or the other, because, you know,
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he's changed his mind many times, he's gone over so many subjects.
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But if someone wants a good, rigorous introduction to Ambedkar, where should he start?
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I would actually, you know, Ambedkar has this phenomenal ability to write short essays,
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letters, give speeches, right?
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So there are these volumes, it's called Ambedkar writes and Ambedkar speaks, they have very
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massive volumes, they were edited by Narendra Jaga.
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But if you just pick up a single essay on the monetary system, it's only three pages
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and immensely accessible and readable.
#
So I strongly recommend people just Google Ambedkar's essay on whatever issue they're
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interested in, whether it's caste, whether it's taxes, whether it's the Sedition Act,
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you know, just Google what he's written and just start reading.
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I often say this to people that I think Ambedkar would have been fantastic on Twitter.
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You know, he came up with like really powerful punch lines, which he delivered so well when
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he was giving speeches.
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So I really miss Ambedkar in present day, not just because he's such a towering and
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But I think his communication skills were so fantastic, he would have been great on
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So I think just pick up, just Google Ambedkar's speeches and just start reading Ambedkar in
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I'm already fantasizing about Ambedkar coming as a guest on the scene in The Unseen, but
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You know, one of my favorite Ambedkar quotes is the caste system is not just the division
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of labor, it's a division of laborers.
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Can you think of a better way to think about the caste system?
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So he's just such a fantastic communicator.
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I just wish, you know, I know people read the 2500 volumes of Gandhi's letters and you
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know, I mean, kudos to them.
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I'm happy those things are read.
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But I still think Ambedkar is just under read and under appreciated as a thinker, you know,
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not as a political figure or someone who unified the various castes and who was important in
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framing the democracy just as an intellectual, a homegrown Indian intellectual.
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I think he's very under appreciated.
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Let's, let's move on now to the subject of this episode, which is something which would
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have interested Ambedkar and I wonder what he would have thought of what's going on in
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And the subject is a government scheme that started with the very best of intentions,
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the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, of which the scene effect as the government keeps tom-tomming
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of course is that we have built X number of toilets and, you know, look what we've done
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Tell us a little bit and you've written on this yourself in your column in livement,
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in mint and tell us a little bit more about your feelings about the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
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So you know, public sanitation is incredibly important in modern civilization, right?
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No question about that.
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We have very low levels of public health and sanitation in the rural areas.
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And these have terrible consequences, right?
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So we have high infant mortality because, you know, little kids, babies get sick because
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the water is polluted or the air is polluted.
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If they get diarrhea, they're not able to survive.
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So there are some really important and terrible consequences for society in terms of not having
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a good framework for public health and sanitation.
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So to that end, I really think it's incredible that this government has taken on a big initiative
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and said we really need to pay attention and devote resources and political capital towards
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So I can very much get behind the general message of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
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I think it's very important and I don't think it should be just these four years and, you
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know, Gandhi's 150th birthday.
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I think we need a Swachh Bharat for all times to come.
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And Shruti, in your piece, which is again linked from the bottom of this episode, it's
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a piece titled India Needs Suits Systems, Not Free Toilets.
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And in your piece, you say, quote, overall, this, which is a Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, seems
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like a well-intentioned and sensible initiative, except for one thing, unquote.
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So now elaborate sort of on what that one thing is.
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If you think about what is the end goal to be achieved, if the end goal to be achieved
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is to eliminate open defecation, genuinely have, you know, better public sanitation,
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I don't think the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in its current form is going to actually achieve
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If the end goal is that toilets need to be distributed to every household, I think that
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So let me unpack that a little bit more for you.
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Now what do you really need to eliminate open defecation?
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So India has one of the highest levels of open defecation anywhere in the world.
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In rural areas, it's higher than 65% or at least it was when the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
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In urban areas, it's in, you know, about 20 to 30% range.
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And what we mean by open defecation is people just go out and do their business in the open.
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Now you live in Mumbai, so you must have seen people squatting next to the train lines in
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This is a very prevalent site in urban India.
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In rural India, they go into, you know, farmland and things like that.
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And this is a very big problem because it's difficult to clean up in cultures that have
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a lot of open defecation.
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All the diseases that small babies, women, actually pretty much people of any age have
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happens because the basic water system is polluted.
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And that is because all this, you know, excreta has not been treated because it's open defecation.
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So this is a very fundamental problem.
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It has massive health and productivity consequences.
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It has very large emotional consequences because it is terrible.
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I mean, every infant that can be saved should be saved.
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And the levels of infant mortality we have in UP and Bihar and things like that are quite
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terrible and embarrassing in the modern world.
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So this has very deep, important consequences for India.
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Now how do you solve for this?
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How does anyone solve for this?
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One way of solving for this is we did waste management systems.
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And you know, you and I have had lots of conversations about what is the role of government?
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You know, what should government do in society at the local state, federal level and so on.
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And I think one really important public good that the government must provide is a good
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waste management system.
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It is very costly, difficult and problematic for every household to have its own waste
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Frankly, it's also quite like, you know, unappealing and a little bit disgusting.
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So the role of government should be to design waste management systems where all you need
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to do is every household is just plugged into that system, right?
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So in urban areas, this can be a functional sewage system, right?
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In rural areas, it could be something on a smaller scale.
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It might be difficult to build large scale sewage systems because hamlets might be far
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apart, but you can still have some kind of a simpler version of a sewage system with,
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you know, an end area where you collect the refuse in a septic tank or take it to another
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location before you treat it and so on.
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And this service has not been provided not just by this government, but any government
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So your larger point is that, look, it seems natural that people are doing open defecation
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and it seems natural that, hey, if you build toilets, they'll have toilets to go to, they'll
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But then the point is once they do their business inside the toilet, what happens then?
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What happens to the waste as it were?
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And that is what you need to build.
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So now the way I think about this Vajparat Abhyan is it's a good initiative, but what
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it's doing is it's solving the last mile problem, right?
#
My point of view is if we had functional sewage systems in urban areas and waste management
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systems in rural areas, it is actually not that expensive to construct a toilet or a
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In fact, the last mile problem would take care of itself.
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So India is already at a level of development where most people don't need a toilet subsidy
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if there is a waste management system that they can easily access.
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And yes, there might be 20% of the people who still need a toilet subsidy.
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And I think at that stage, I would very much encourage any government, state, federal,
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local tool, you know, help build subsidized toilets and so on.
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But right now we are actually creating a new kind of problem.
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And it's funny, we were talking about Ambedkar just a few moments ago.
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So now India has deep persistence of the caste system, right?
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One very important part of the caste system is ritual purity and what certain castes consider
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polluting behavior and so on and so forth, right?
#
Many of the historically oppressed castes were oppressed either into doing all these
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distasteful jobs or were oppressed because they took on these jobs, right?
#
So the lowest caste in society, in fact, these are castes that weren't even allowed to live
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They were outcasts to see what is now called manual scavenging, right?
#
They were manual scavengers.
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What they would do is there would be an outhouse at the back where people did their business
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and it would be collected and these people would not even be allowed to enter the house.
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They would just come from the back.
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They would pick up all the human refuse and they would take it literally like carry a
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tank or a basket on their head and go to the next house.
#
So you can imagine how terrible it is to have a profession dedicated to having to carry
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someone else's feces in your hands, right?
#
And now you can also imagine that in a culture which is so obsessed with the caste system
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and ritual purity, how groups would treat people who actually engage in this activity
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as a form of livelihood manual scavengers were treated abominably in India, right?
#
And the system came about simply because there was no other waste management system.
#
So now if you think about the long-term consequences of having only a latrine in the house and
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not a waste management system, what we're doing is we're bringing back manual scavenging.
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It's actually coming back.
#
So now there are two types of consequences of having toilets but no waste management
#
One consequence is people are just using those toilets as storage units or to keep your provisions
#
or wash your clothes or something.
#
And they actually still do their business out in the open, right?
#
So toilets are there, but open defecation hasn't reduced.
#
The other group is they do decide to use the latrine or the toilet that has been built
#
by the government, but they don't want to touch anything to do with their own feces.
#
So now what happens is you perpetuate the caste system by bringing back manual scavenging,
#
which by the way was abolished many decades ago in India.
#
So that is one of the unintended or the unseen consequences of building toilets without building
#
What people really want, so you, okay.
#
So let me put this in perspective in an ideal world.
#
You want people not to have all these ridiculous ideas about ritual purity.
#
You want people to make use of latrines.
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You want people not to openly defecate.
#
That's the ideal world.
#
We don't live in the ideal world.
#
We live in a deeply backward society from the point of view of caste, right?
#
And it is so persistent and it is impossible to break down overnight.
#
People who have these kinds of values about ritual purity, though I don't subscribe or
#
endorse any of them, they would actually use the latrine or the toilet that was built at
#
home were it connected to a sewage system where you could just flush the refuse away,
#
And that system we don't have right now.
#
And until we get that system, you're going to have lots of toilets, but you're not going
#
to solve the public health and sanitation problem.
#
And if you do manage to solve the public health and sanitation problem a little bit, you're
#
going to have a whole class of workers who are oppressed once again because of manual
#
In fact, you know, that's a very unintuitive conclusion in the sense that a sewage system
#
is not just something that will help with hygiene and public health, but it will also
#
help in eliminating the caste system.
#
And in some small way, in some small way, and at the very least, even if it doesn't
#
eliminate it, at least it won't perpetuate it.
#
We really have to worry about and especially at the rural level, you know, in places like
#
UP and Bihar, where the caste system is very persistent, open education is very persistent
#
and you have very low levels of, you know, economic growth.
#
This is the trifecta for caste oppression.
#
And we'll take a slight literary digression here.
#
Have you heard of Pablo Neruda, the poet from Chile?
#
So there is a story of Neruda and you mentioned, you know, outhouses and how these scavengers
#
were looked upon as almost subhuman in a sense.
#
And there is a story of how when Neruda was a young man in his twenties and is related
#
by Neruda himself in his autobiography, if I remember correctly, and Neruda was posted
#
to Sri Lanka as some sort of ambassadorial kind of, you know, some part of their foreign
#
And he lived in a house which had an outhouse at the back for doing the business.
#
And he was curious about how every day I do my business, but when I come the next morning
#
it's pick and span, it's clean.
#
So one day he decided to find out and he saw this dark skinned lady walking up, taking
#
his refuse and just going away.
#
And for some reason being of a poetic temperament or whatever, he fell in love or rather one
#
should say he fell in lust with her and he waited like that for three, four days and
#
she would come at the crack of dawn, take away his business as it were and just go away.
#
And then one day he just held her by the hand, took her inside to his bedroom and he had
#
And it was obviously rape because he described how she just lay inert with no expression
#
on her face and not even resisting.
#
Which kind of tells you about A, the power dynamic involved and B, also the fact that
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these people were considered subhuman.
#
So there was no agency and there was no trace of empathy in him as you would expect for
#
Which is why decades later when he's a renowned Nobel prize winning poet, he actually writes
#
about this openly without any trace of remorse in his autobiography, which is just remarkably
#
shocking and which tells you so much about the man himself.
#
I mean, one can't read his poetry in the same light after that, but it also illustrates
#
what you were saying about the inequities of the caste system and to some extent those
#
inequities being perpetuated or being made explicit by sort of the physical logistics
#
of this outhouse outside and the person who comes and collects human refuse before people
#
And you know, I mean, of course the men are treated terribly, the women are always treated
#
There is a very, very big problem of rape against by upper caste.
#
I say upper caste and lower caste, not because I think these are upper or lower caste, it's
#
just that's the vocabulary used.
#
But people who think that they're of an upper caste, there's a lot of rape of Dalit women
#
by people higher up in the power structure.
#
But there's also a rape problem with open defecation.
#
You know, women have to go outside at like 4, 4.30 in the morning.
#
There is a lot of sexual abuse that happens because we haven't provided even the most
#
basic types of sanitation system so that women can be safe.
#
And this is a point you recommended.
#
I read the superb book, which I ended up doing called Where India Goes by Diane Coffey and
#
And they make pretty much the same points about open defecation and ritual purity that
#
And, you know, that book is really fantastic for multiple reasons because the authors never
#
came to the subject wanting to write about the caste system.
#
They came to the subject as health economists, right?
#
They were trying to understand high levels of infant mortality and just, you know, the
#
health problems in these developing areas.
#
And what they discovered was, oh, there are all these toilets being built, but you would
#
think people would just jump at it and it would be a superior alternative to open defecation.
#
But it's actually an inferior alternative to open defecation because they live in a
#
world where the caste system persists and they are not allowed to touch their own refuse.
#
And if they do, then there are questions about their purity and they have polluted themselves
#
And what I love about the book is it places what is a development or an economic problem
#
beautifully in the social context within which we are trying to solve that problem.
#
So you can't have solutions to these problems by ignoring what is the local or the social
#
The caste problem in UP, you don't have this problem in Fisherman Hamlets in Tamil Nadu.
#
They are perfectly fine.
#
They have eliminated open defecation and they don't have this problem of ritual purity and
#
They have other caste issues, but this is not one that is highly persistent among them.
#
So I think we really need to think about public health, public sanitation in a very local
#
And to that extent, I would recommend everyone reads this book.
#
It was my pick for the best book written last year.
#
The book is called Where India Goes.
#
It's a book called Where India Goes by Diane Coffey and Dean Spears and there'll be a link
#
to the Amazon page on it below the podcast.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and then we'll come back to talk, to move on from economics
#
and the social issues of this and talk a little bit about the politics and the public choice
#
So it's going to be a great week on IVM this week.
#
We have a brand new podcast launching Wordy Wardpecker with Rachel Lopez.
#
Every Tuesday, Rachel is going to break down fascinating words and why they mean what they
#
The show releases on the 21st of August.
#
Be sure to check it out.
#
And we have another new show launching as well, Know Your Kanun hosted by lawyer Ambar Rana
#
where he addresses all law related questions and gives us insights into the legal system
#
On Cyrus Says, this week Cyrus chats with actor Kubra Seth about the experience of making
#
sacred games, life, post the show and her body of work.
#
On Colabra Cartel, we have Jeremy Buck and Sandeep Hathiramani, the experts behind the
#
They talk about the innovative cocktails they put on that menu.
#
On the Vishal Gondal show, Vishal speaks to Milind Devra about his interest in music,
#
his vision for the country and a hell of a lot more.
#
Coach Urmi talks to actor and model Sarah-Jane Dias about her fitness inspiration on the
#
Kinetic Living podcast this week.
#
And don't miss out on the final episode of Marvel's Lost and Found for this first season,
#
Therapy 101 hosted by Zain and Avanti.
#
Also guys, we're looking for a new producer, a social media intern and a graphic designer.
#
If you are interested in working with IVM and it's a cool bunch of people to work with,
#
please send us an email to jobs at indusvox.com.
#
Also please make sure you're following us on social media if you're not, we're IVM podcasts
#
on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
Coming back to the scene and the unseen, I'm talking with Shruti Rajgopalan and we're discussing
#
India's Swachh Bharat Abhyan, which achieved the very feel-good, look-nice kind of outcome
#
of building a huge number of toilets across the country and you would assume that that
#
helped with solving our sanitation problems, which are also massive public health problems
#
because as Shruti explained, open defecation leads to a public health crisis.
#
It affects child mortality, kids actually dying much younger than they otherwise would
#
and it's a humanitarian issue and you would think logically that if people don't have
#
toilets in their home, you're building them toilets, that's surely great, but as Shruti
#
pointed out, the unseen side of this is that with the toilet, you're just solving the last
#
Let's show the guy can go to the toilet and do his job, but what happens after that?
#
What happens with, let's say, the refuse that he's left there?
#
If you don't have a good waste disposal system, if you don't have a good sewage system, then
#
that necessarily means that his refuse has to be cleaned either by himself or by somebody
#
else and that has led to a return of manual scavenging and some of the worst of the caste
#
system as an unintended consequence and therefore the answer lies in building sewage systems
#
and waste disposal systems and the toilets will take care of themselves once the infrastructure
#
Is that an accurate summation, Shruti?
#
I would also add one line that we can also think about education, educating people about
#
the so-called ritual purity nonsense.
#
So I would also support educating people about the caste system and why manually pumping
#
out or cleaning out your latrine doesn't make you impure and actually protects your family
#
I would say that is also a good way to go, but our education system is so badly broken,
#
I'm not holding my breath.
#
Even apart from that, certain religious and traditional beliefs, whatever you call them,
#
are often immune to education because we are still a deeply superstitious society with
#
all kinds of ludicrously irrational beliefs about everyday life.
#
And you know, of all the things, this is generally so unpleasant.
#
I don't have any of these ritual purity beliefs, right?
#
But this is generally such an unpleasant area that any excuse you can get to not have to
#
touch feces is, you know, people are just going to sort of jump on it.
#
I'm just talking from a human nature perspective, right?
#
No one is very excited about manually pumping out or use latrine.
#
No, in fact, I would say that, you know, invoking natural selection that a disgust towards feces
#
is selected for because obviously if you handle your own feces, you're likely to fall ill
#
and so on and so forth that affects your survival.
#
So it's selected for its naturalist instinctive and there's nothing wrong with it.
#
But the point is that if you just had a good waste disposal system, you wouldn't need
#
to touch your own feces or to get someone else to do it, you would just pull the flush.
#
And also a question of equipment and training and things like that, right?
#
There are many solutions between open defecation and a sophisticated sewage system that New
#
So there are many intermediate levels of waste management systems which require resources
#
and local context and training the, you know, municipality workers on how to use them.
#
And we don't have we don't pay any attention to any of those things.
#
So we are 71 years past independence.
#
Why haven't we done it yet?
#
Like, let's not talk about this government or that government on Nehru versus Modi.
#
Everyone's had a shortage.
#
Not much movement has happened.
#
So the number one reason and you know, Amit, you and I have spoken about this personally
#
and also on the podcast.
#
The number one reason is we until very recently did not have a functional layer of local government.
#
These are problems that are meant to be resolved by the local government.
#
You can't have the central government trying to figure out that in the South Bangla area,
#
you know, do we need to build a new sewage system or extend the pipeline for the new
#
building to be connected?
#
These are local problems.
#
They need local solutions.
#
We didn't have local government.
#
That is a very, very big part of the problem and extremely underappreciated, especially
#
Now we've had a local government system for about 25 years.
#
We just celebrated the 25th anniversary of, you know, the Panchayati Raj and urban local
#
body, the constitutional amendments, which were the 73rd and 74th amendment.
#
So we created a layer of local government, but we didn't give them any responsibility
#
nor did we give them any revenue raising authority.
#
You and I have done a podcast on this before.
#
So basically you have local governments today, but they have no budgets, right?
#
And the state government has just held on to power and revenue and they haven't devolved
#
responsibility or the budgets to these local governments.
#
So I would say the number one blame, sort of, I would place on why we don't have good
#
local public sanitation systems is because we never had good local government.
#
We never invested in that layer of government.
#
So we done a podcast on this earlier, which is one of my favorite episodes.
#
In fact, it's an episode on urban governance.
#
If you just go to sceneunseen.ie and you can find that in the archival episodes, I don't
#
remember the episode number, but let me quickly try and sum up the sort of insights that you
#
gave us in that episode where your whole point was that when it comes to local governance,
#
urban or otherwise, there is a disconnect between power and accountability.
#
Who's accountable to us?
#
Your local corporator and so on.
#
They're all accountable to you.
#
They depend on your votes to get to office.
#
But who has a power over you?
#
These guys don't really have much power because local government in our constitution and in
#
our system simply hasn't been given that much power.
#
All the power is really with the state government and when it comes to, for example, a city
#
like Mumbai, the state government is not so accountable to you because it depends more
#
on rural votes or votes from outside the city and on different constituencies like there'll
#
be a constituency of farmers and so on and so forth.
#
And when you have local problems that need to be solved, the person who is accountable
#
to you doesn't have the power to solve them.
#
And the people who do have the power and the budgets to affect their lives don't care about
#
you because your vote doesn't matter to them.
#
Is that an accurate summation?
#
That's an accurate summation.
#
I would also add one last point, which is, you know, you live in Andheri, Andheri doesn't
#
have much of an open defecation problem as far as I know.
#
It has other problems, garbage collection, poor sidewalks, you know, those kinds of problems.
#
So if you were to now talk about open defecation, maybe that's a problem in rural Maharashtra.
#
It's very difficult for people like Amit living in Andheri to coordinate with people in rural
#
Maharashtra and put together a platform when their local problems are so different.
#
They are going to be asking for really basic things, right?
#
Like how can we secure a well?
#
And you are asking for far more sophisticated things.
#
So not only does your vote matter less at the state level, it's far more difficult and
#
far less likely to organize different groups because they have very different local problems
#
which are highly contextual.
#
So the ideal system of government, therefore, is obviously as local as possible.
#
And we are planning to do an episode on Panchayat-e-Raj, so, you know, watch out for that in the coming
#
But the ideal government is as local as possible.
#
So people within an area know what their immediate concerns are, and they can make sure that
#
their government, which is accountable to them, will actually do those things.
#
And for that, they need to have the power to do those things.
#
And that power has never been devolved to local governments at all because the central
#
and the state governments, obviously, anybody who has power is hesitant to give away a part
#
So in one sense, you know, Prime Minister Modi and his team, which is running the Swachh
#
Bharat Abhiyan, they are definitely quite sensible.
#
They know that they can't build waste management systems.
#
So they say we'll build toilets instead, right?
#
So they are actually quite sensible in that they are trying to solve the problem that
#
you can actually implement at the central level.
#
So to that extent, the program is an enormous success, but the program is an enormous failure
#
if the goal is actually public sanitation and public health, right, because it's never
#
going to solve it unless you have local partners who can help convert this network of latrines
#
into a sensible waste management system.
#
So that is really the core of the conundrum that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan poses.
#
It's important to solve the last mile problem, but you have to solve the last mile problem
#
You can't ask PM Modi to solve the initial first hundred mile problem because it simply
#
can't be done at the centralized level.
#
It has to be devolved to the local level.
#
I'll both back you up and take a cynical view of that.
#
My criticism of the Modi government right from 2014 is that they have never got into
#
They have continued in campaigning mode, which they are incredibly good at, and pretty much
#
everything they do at the level of government is for the sake of optics.
#
So even in the Swachh Bharat campaign is great optics that, hey, we've built so many million
#
toilets and it looks great and you can declare it a success, but they don't really care
#
beyond that, which I think is a cross against them.
#
At the same time, I'll agree with you and say that as far as solving the deeper problem
#
of public sanitation is concerned, that yes, the central government can't really do much.
#
You're spot on about that.
#
But at the same time, the central government could accept the structural problem, which
#
is preventing that the whole issue that local governments don't have enough power or enough
#
power hasn't devolved down to local governments and do something about solving that structural
#
problem, which is not something I see either.
#
There I must agree with you, both the central and the state level, and here I pose even
#
more emphasis on state level legislatures and executive, which is they really need to
#
get their act together and recognize that local governance problems can never be resolved
#
at that level of centrality.
#
And you know, Indian states are larger than most European and Latin American countries
#
in terms of size and population.
#
So even at the state level, it's like trying to build a, you know, a suede system for Brazil
#
So it's not like the state level is some chota level in India, right?
#
It's still a very, very complex system with very large area and very large population
#
and diversity in population, lots and lots of local issues.
#
So I think there needs to be a recognition of this in India, that the level of complexity
#
that the Indian polity poses.
#
And I don't see any of that at the central or the state level at this point in terms
#
And another thing that we don't see and explain to me why that is so, is that normally you
#
would imagine that when there is such a far reaching problem of public health, when, you
#
know, babies die younger than they need to, when, you know, it's a humanitarian crisis
#
in a manner of speaking has continued on for more than seven decades, you would imagine
#
that citizens would take a stand and they would be constant morchas and dharnas and
#
so on and so forth till something is done about it.
#
But even citizens don't seem to excuse the phrasing, give a shit about this.
#
So you know, I find citizen apathy is very contextual.
#
You know, my parents recently moved to a condo building in Noida.
#
You know, it's all the typical things you would associate with a middle class or an
#
upper upper middle class condo society, right?
#
It's got all these buildings and they have a whole co-op and a voting system where, you
#
know, all the people get together and they raise their voice over daily issues.
#
When I go to one of those meetings, it's like my blood pressure goes up.
#
People are so passionate about, you know, should this be the entry gate and the exit
#
gate or only the entry gate, right?
#
How many speed breakers should we have in front of which of the building should you
#
have the speed breaker so that, you know, children are not faced with the fast traffic
#
coming in and outside the parking garage?
#
Should you have a water desalination plant because that's a big problem in Noida.
#
People are deeply passionate, like deeply passionate.
#
They shout, they yell, they politic, they, you know, have parties with other association
#
members where they say, this is Noida, they probably murder as well.
#
And when I think about why isn't it that these people are doing this with the Noida municipal
#
cooperation, they're like upper middle class people who don't even go to vote.
#
It's because they pay condo association fees and the condo president lives next door, right?
#
And the whole board membership lives next door.
#
So if your governance problems aren't solved, you just pick up the phone and go badmouth
#
And if they are solved, then you host a dinner party for them, right?
#
There's a huge link between what you pay and what you get.
#
The feedback mechanisms are very tight at the local level, right?
#
So I think we need to put citizen apathy in context.
#
Of course there is citizen apathy in Andheri.
#
No one knows the name of the municipal corporator because no one has to, because he can never
#
solve these problems or she can never solve these problems.
#
Whereas the president of the condo association in Noida can and does.
#
And at the same time, at the same time, the residents of the condo association and Noida,
#
what they are doing is simply they're demanding a bank for their buck.
#
They want those services.
#
And yet somehow at the level of the citizen, we seem to have disassociated ourselves from
#
the fact that we also pay a constant cost for government and yet we don't demand enough
#
We take taxes for granted, even though they are coercive and mostly highly unfair.
#
And we don't get any bank for our buck.
#
And also we take the government for granted and we assume that, you know, we behave essentially
#
like subjects that whatever is done for us, you know, it's great.
#
And otherwise we don't stand up and demand our rights enough.
#
But even there, Amit, there's a centralization problem.
#
You don't know who you're paying tax to.
#
You don't know where it's going.
#
There is a Swachh Bharat says that goes to the central government, right?
#
If your local municipal corporator and the local municipal body had the authority to
#
levy taxes and raise taxes, you will also be marching in Andheri, if not you, a bunch
#
of other people, right?
#
Saying, dude, you raised our local taxes and you didn't clean the garbage.
#
So you really need to think small at this level.
#
And your point is that the apathy is rational because we know that we can't do anything
#
So people we can protest to are powerless to do anything about it.
#
And your argument is that we would be less apathetic if the structure of government changed.
#
So I don't see this level of apathy.
#
I mean, look at Indians on Twitter, look at Indians at their dinner parties, look at Indians
#
at their condo association meetings.
#
They don't come across as apathetic.
#
In fact, you know, the Amartya Sen version of the Indian, the argumentative Indian, that
#
is a much more fitting description because we discuss, we fight, right?
#
Passionately, emotionally.
#
On Twitter, you don't have the argumentative Indian, you have the abusive Indian or the
#
virtue signaling Indian.
#
You have, you have all sorts of Indians, right?
#
It's very hard to find a good argument.
#
It's not fundamentally, they're not culturally apathetic, that Indians are apathetic.
#
I think it's contextual, you're apathetic when you know that your voice will not be
#
heard and there is going to be no feedback coming from the other side.
#
So you try once or twice and then you give up.
#
And when your voice can be heard, you do use your voice and you do demand change.
#
So I think we really need to think about structure of government and, you know, just better systems
#
And, you know, at the local level, you can also experiment more, right?
#
And very Eastern and very West are large enough that you can have two different kinds of local
#
governments and then you can see which one worked better.
#
So you can have more experimentation.
#
You can have a greater level of addressing the local problem in the local context.
#
You can experiment with tax rates, right?
#
You have far more competition, political competition at the local level.
#
And we have basically not capitalized on this incredibly important political mechanism.
#
In fact, Andheri West and Andheri East together have more than four times the population of
#
I pointed this out recently after Iceland held Argentina to a draw, I think it was on
#
Yeah, not even half as good a football team.
#
Yeah, no, no, I didn't even mention that.
#
I just said to put it into perspective, Iceland has less than a quarter of the population
#
And these words were meant as praise for Iceland to put their achievement in context.
#
And instead, everybody assumed I was being anti-national and dissing India and I got hugely
#
So not the argumentative Indian, but the abusive Indian.
#
But sort of go back to the sort of the public choice question of that.
#
And I won't ask you to spend much time on this because we discussed it in our episode
#
on urban governance already, but for listeners who might not have heard that, how can this
#
And like, obviously, then the solution is clear that you need more power to devolve
#
to local government so that your local representative actually has the power to do anything, has
#
actually the power to do what her constituents desire.
#
But is this ever likely to happen?
#
Because it strikes me that those who have that centralized power are never going to
#
How can those incentives change?
#
I definitely think one thing that's going to happen is the switch from, you know, right
#
now, urban issues are not addressed at all.
#
And rural issues are much more on the on the table for state legislatures.
#
But that said, this is a rural issue as well.
#
But this is a universal issue.
#
But what I mean is, I do see a switch happening that state governments will recognize urban
#
problems a little bit more than they did before.
#
Now, having said that, I don't see any incentive for them incentive for them to devolve power.
#
I think what needs to happen, I think the impetus has to come from a few great women
#
and men, you know, just so the Constitution leaves the option open to devolve power, right?
#
It doesn't stop you from doing it, but it doesn't make it mandatory.
#
So there is the question of I think we need some good state chief ministers who say, you
#
know what, we're going to devolve these four areas to local government.
#
And then let's see how it plays out, because there's nothing constitutionally preventing
#
So I do think we need some good show of leadership at the state government level.
#
And frankly, we've had a great run with, you know, I mean, we have a wide variation in
#
quality of chief ministers, but we've also had good ones, you know, not just bad ones.
#
You have states where you actually had better local governance, right?
#
Kerala is an example, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, the southern states are much better on local
#
governance than the northern states are.
#
So you do have some good examples where obviously the states either invested in local governance
#
even before the 73rd, 74th Amendment or at the very least embraced this idea that you
#
I think what states are not doing is devolving revenue raising authority.
#
I really think one important thing to do is bring property taxes under GST.
#
But like you have central and state GST, that should be local GST that should not go to
#
So it's the same system.
#
It's just, you know, the same tax rate, but it's who which is the agency that actually
#
ends up collecting or getting that revenue.
#
So I think we need to get into a system of good property taxes because property taxes
#
are local, people invest in that local area and property owners will then demand the bank
#
for their buck and their vote and their tax payment will be linked to the same person.
#
Right now our vote and our tax payment go to completely different groups.
#
So I really think that is an important step.
#
So you know, maybe the GST could also solve this problem by bringing in property taxes
#
under its fold and implementing it at the local government level.
#
Now you can imagine the biggest opposition to this is state governments because they
#
lose potential revenue and they also lose authority.
#
So they are really what is the, you know, the big interest group which is blocking this
#
And at some level, you know, I tend to be a little skeptical of this whole notion of
#
relying on say benevolent or enlightened chief ministers to make the changes that are necessary
#
because the constitution allows them to.
#
But the fact is that the incentives are against it and humans react to incentives and something
#
you keep going on and on about and that, you know, if they just do what the incentives
#
dictate that they will do, this will never get done.
#
So you know, I also think that there are multiple incentives in politics, right?
#
So of course there are the incentives of, you know, protecting your turf and getting
#
revenue and getting reelected.
#
But I do think a lot of politicians are also interested in being remembered.
#
They're interested in, you know, entering the history books.
#
I think their incentives are much more complex.
#
So I agree with you that there is this whole public choice thing and we can't just rely
#
on people's benevolence.
#
But I am not saying we should rely on their benevolence.
#
I'm just saying they could have multi dimensions to how they think they want to be perceived
#
or remembered or reelected.
#
And to that extent, for some of them, it might be very much in line with devolving power
#
or experimenting with new, you know, new sort of governance ideas and so on.
#
And at the local level, even assuming that they were to devolve power, an interesting
#
point you made earlier when we were chatting about the subject on building a waste management
#
system is that while the benefits are diffused, the costs are actually concentrated and a
#
few people feel the brunt of it to begin with, which is again a reason for opposition against
#
Can you elaborate on that a bit?
#
So, you know, there is, I mean, even once you resolve the problem and devolve power
#
to the local level, there is a current mismatch between the costs and benefits, right?
#
So when I go to a store and I buy an apple, I pay the cost for the apple and I get the
#
benefits of the apple, right?
#
So the costs and benefits are perfectly aligned.
#
Now in politics, that's not always the case.
#
And it's really not the case in this particular instance.
#
So if you need to build a waste management system, it doesn't happen overnight, right?
#
So in a place like Andheri, if you had to expand the existing sewage system to accommodate
#
the population growth and the migration, you need to dig up all the roads.
#
Now I have been to Andheri and I have driven there in traffic and it's already a nightmare.
#
You know, when the metro and things were being built, it was just a nightmare to navigate
#
the streets of Andheri.
#
So now you have a situation where all the costs are imposed in the present, right?
#
All the roads are dug up right now.
#
All the benefits come in the future.
#
Babies 10 years from today will have, you know, low levels of infant mortality, low
#
levels of vulnerability to public health problems.
#
And those babies will go 20 years after that, right, 18 years after that.
#
So the benefits are far in the future.
#
The beneficiaries, some of them haven't even been born or are not even in the system yet.
#
All the costs are upfront today being faced by people who need to get to work fast and
#
So it's obviously a very big problem of, yeah, we would love a sewage system, but we don't
#
want our street to be dug up, right?
#
In rural areas, there is also caste dimension to the problem.
#
They'll be like, you know, the sewage system can't go behind my house.
#
It can't go under my Tulsi plant, right?
#
There are all those dimensions also to think of.
#
So there is a lot of opposition to spending the money and the time that needs to be devoted
#
to building a waste management system because it, it involves some kind of disturbance of
#
current infrastructure.
#
So all the costs are in the present, all the benefits are in the future.
#
The second problem is all the benefits are dispersed and all the costs are concentrated.
#
So the benefits are dispersed in the sense that all of us benefit if there is a better
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public waste management system because it leads to better public sanitation and therefore
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better public health, right?
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All of us benefit if babies are not dying under the age of one.
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So and all of us also benefit if the groundwater is not polluted because we also access it,
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However, all the costs politically are taken on by the, you know, state chief minister
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or the local corporator who are implementing the system right now, because when everything
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is dug up, people will protest, they will vote them out, right?
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And the benefits will be reaped by the municipal corporator or the legislator three terms down
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because that's when we really saw, Oh, I know we suffered through all the dug up roads,
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but how wonderful it is to have a really functional clean environment.
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So this problem of dispersed benefits and concentrated costs and benefits in the future
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and costs in the present, this creates a very big problem when we are talking about how
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do we overcome the interests and actually build waste management systems.
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So another way of putting this would be that the benefits are unseen and the costs are
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For example, the guy whose infant daughter could be saved from an early death 10 years
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later because of a good sewage system today, he can't possibly see that now.
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What he can see is that it's taking him half an hour longer to get to work because the
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roads are dug up and so on and so forth.
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All the inconveniences are obvious, which then leads us to the pessimistic conclusion
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that even if the structural problems of local governance, the sort of the delinking between
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votes and money were solved, you would still have this problem getting in the way.
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No, but you know, it can be, I think you still have a better shot at solving it at the local
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So right now, if you think about it, we don't have very good charismatic leaders at the
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local government level.
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Because there is not much for them to do and they don't have much revenue raising authority
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If you actually build a sensible structural system where local governments become important,
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then you're going to have really charismatic people who come in to the local government
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system and can actually explain to the people that, hey, I know it feels like a giant problem
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today, but there will be a benefit from it.
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I think Prime Minister Modi is fantastic at this.
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Look at the rhetoric he built around demonetization.
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I don't personally support demonetization, but look at how he managed to convince 1.25
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billion people that I know it is hugely costly and you're standing in line, but this is going
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to be hugely beneficial to the country and we request you to make this sacrifice.
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And people fell hook line and sinker, right?
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We shouldn't underestimate the importance of leaders being able to communicate the value
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of a good project or in the case of demonetization, a terrible project, right?
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So I really think if we switch the attention to the local level, you will get people who
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manage to overcome these problems simply through better communication.
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Have you noticed when there are new buildings being built in Mumbai?
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What happens is they have these huge hoardings of how the building will look in the future,
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So all you see is like this awful structure, but you see this beautiful photograph of kids
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playing in a shining swimming pool and all that.
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You have entrepreneurs who are able to project in the future to help you imagine what you
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can't imagine yourself, right?
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And I don't see why you can't have that politics.
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I just don't think anyone has the incentive right now to put in that kind of effort and
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to engage in that kind of entrepreneurship because nothing is, it's not possible to solve
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anything at the local level, but I do think if you had a good structure of local government
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with good authority, I mean in New York, Bloomberg ran for mayor, right?
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There was, there was an important job there to be done, which came with responsibility,
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which came with power, which came with a certain reputation and he didn't run for the Senate.
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He ran to be the mayor of New York city and I don't see why that wouldn't happen if you
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devolved power and authority and revenue raising capabilities in India.
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I do think that can happen and I think you will see very creative political solutions
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on, they won't be uniform, but creative political solutions on how to solve these problems.
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I buy your point though, I disagree with your example, I buy your point that if there is
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a more meaningful role for local government to play, then better leaders will emerge,
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especially people who've experienced problems firsthand, like a waste management or traffic
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or potholes or whatever, who will then say, Hey, I can finally do something about this
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because local government has a power.
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Let me go out there and do something and you know, like in the housing society where your
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parents stay in Noida, people will get similarly involved here.
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So I buy that point, I don't quite agree with the example of Modi.
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I think this country has suffered too much because he places rhetoric above actual governance,
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but I understand the sense in which you, I'm not saying it's a good thing in that case,
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but what I mean is we do have an example of a political leader who has told people that
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there is value in their sacrifice.
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That's not an easy message to sell if you really think about it, right?
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Selling to people that, Hey, I know you're waiting four hours in line outside the ATM
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and the bank, but it's all for a great cause and people did it, right?
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That's the part I want to focus on, not the demonetization was a good idea or Modi did
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a great service to India by engaging in that kind of rhetoric, but what I mean is it can
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be done and if it can be done for a bad idea, I don't see why we can't do it for a good
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idea, like building a waste management system.
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On that optimistic note, Shruti, thanks a lot for coming on the scene in The Unseen.
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As usual, I learned a lot from you today.
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Thanks Amit, it was a pleasure.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do check out all the related links of the
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essays and books that we mentioned during the show on the episodes page on either scene
#
unseen.in or thinkpragati.com.
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You can follow Shruti on Twitter at S Raj Gopalan and you can follow me at Amit Verma.
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Thank you for listening.
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