Making India cleaner is a big challenge. What experienced as dirty, many Indians don’t, I guess, as they consider this state as normal and do not see a problem in it. We saw people unpacking food in a car and throwing out the packaging out of the window on a crowded street. Nobody bothered. We saw dumped trash directly in front of the straw huts (see below) where we “resided” in Hampi and the owners of the accomodations didn’t seem to be aware that litter puts people off, when they spend their vaction there.
The dirt that felt nearly omnipresent was for me clearly the major downside of our vacation. When you feel dirty, you don’t feel comfortable. In some places I had the impression that ther is just noone taken litter away, so that the people “producing” it just had to find a place to dump it. I recall only two handful places that I found explicitely clean: The “brahman street” (see Kochi post), the Vector office, the houseboat in Allepey, the ancient temples in Hampi and most of our hotel rooms (bathrooms excluded). That was one reason why the hotel room had its role as “safe space” and going out sometimes appeared like “exploring the jungle”, which of course is nonsense, but feelings are often not following some mindful sense. One other reason for the safe space hotel room was of course the air conditioned climate versus the 28 – 32 degree temperature outside with its 50 to 70 % humidity, that stressed my mid-european body, an in the hotel we could literally “chill”.
So, making India cleaner is a big challenge. But one that has been accepted by the state. The Clean India Mission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swachh_Bharat_Mission) started in 2014 and wants to make India cleaner. While it’s not primarily aiming at throwin away garbage (but public defecation, which we saw only rarely) the mission’s thought of cleanliness shall come into every indians’s mind. this is reflected in the fact that the missions icon and slogan “One step towards cleanliness” can be found on every bank note of the current series. Also schools and public buildings promote the mission on their walls.
Given the success of primary goal of the campaign [1] within few years, we can imagine tha India is capable of much more progress in therms of cleanliness and we will see more pictures like this tha the first one.
P.S: I also saw people throw out food packages out of the car in Germany, especially near fast food restaurants, so also in Germany we’re far from perfect.