‘Old habits die hard’:^*

* Variations of the quote ‘Old habits die hard’ have been invoked by Modi in talking about the need for Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) as well as by representatives of The Ugly Indian (TUI). It highlights the centrality of the need for behavior change that both campaigns focus on. For instance, in a news column discussing illegal dumping of garbage, TUI states, ‘Old habits die hard. Rather than wait for collection, people come here and dump like they always used to  …  ’ (TUI 2014). Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in one of his speeches encouraging behavior change, said ‘Old habits take time to change. It’s a difficult task, I know  …  ’ (Modi 2014a).

discourses of urban filth in Swachh Bharat Mission and The Ugly Indian

ABSTRACT

Popular framings of the contemporary urban Indian waste crisis focus on the crucial need for public behavior change. This article provides an exploratory study of the ideology and work of two social media campaigns – Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission and The Ugly Indian, a social media group – which emphasize the need for inculcating ‘modern’ civic behaviors of not littering, and volunteering to clean up public spaces, and examines the following questions: What types of urban imaginaries are invoked in the discussions of urban filth? Do these discussions betray structural (class-based) biases in the aesthetic ideologies they imagine and invoke? Do these discussions reify the public-private dichotomy that has puzzled scholars concerned with hygiene in urban India? Discourses deployed in these campaigns reproduce colonial and post-colonial narratives of hygiene as a ‘cultural problem’ premised on an idea of a pre-modern urban subject who needs to be disciplined. By focusing on behavior change, these campaigns privilege an understanding of waste as an aesthetic problem rather than as a much more complicated infrastructural one. As these campaigns focus on highlighting and celebrating the volunteer labor of the privileged, they may also obfuscate the economically necessary labors of the marginalized.

KEYWORDS:

• Swachh Bharat
• volunteerism
• waste
• urban India
• anti-littering campaigns
• social media

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Erica Schoenberger and the staff at Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group for their help and support during the course of dissertation fieldwork and writing. The author also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Dr Srinivas Melkote and Dr Matthew Thomann for their insightful comments on the draft versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aman Luthra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College. He received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University in 2015. His research interests lie at the intersections of urban planning, political ecology and development studies.

ORCID

Aman Luthra http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8574-7271

Notes

* Variations of the quote ‘Old habits die hard’ have been invoked by Modi in talking about the need for Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) as well as by representatives of The Ugly Indian (TUI). It highlights the centrality of the need for behavior change that both campaigns focus on. For instance, in a news column discussing illegal dumping of garbage, TUI states, ‘Old habits die hard. Rather than wait for collection, people come here and dump like they always used to  …  ’ (TUI 2014). Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in one of his speeches encouraging behavior change, said ‘Old habits take time to change. It’s a difficult task, I know  …  ’ (Modi 2014a).

1. The Economist (March 3, 2018) reported that though 8 of the top 10 polluters of plastic trash are in Asia, India is not among them. Despite its 1.3 billion people and wide use of plastic, India has an informal recycling system thanks to its armies of waste pickers.

Additional information

Funding

The author’s dissertation, on which this paper is partly based, was supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement [grant number 1202985], Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship and multiple grants from the Johns Hopkins University.