Learning from China and Japan

Two recent news items suggest that India has a lot to learn from the east Asian countries like China and Japan. The first one is about Minister for Rural Development and Sanitation Jairam Ramesh’s statement on 27 July that the Indian rail is the world’s largest “open toilet”. This comment is true and almost every foreigner travelling by train in India would agree. The solution to this embarrassing situation may be easy, if some technology is developed for collecting the night soil and converting it into biogas on the train or on the train stations.

Two recent news items suggest that India has a lot to learn from the east Asian countries like China and Japan. The first one is about Minister for Rural Development and Sanitation Jairam Ramesh’s statement on 27 July that the Indian rail is the world’s largest “open toilet”. This comment is true and almost every foreigner travelling by train in India would agree. The solution to this embarrassing situation may be easy, if some technology is developed for collecting the night soil and converting it into biogas on the train or on the train stations. I am reminded of a book written by the late Tushar K Moulik of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He had found that after China learned from India about the gobar gas technology in the late 1940s, it scaled up the technology so much that the number of biogas plants in China surpassed those in India. This is what he found when he visited China as a part of an Indian delegation in 1981. China could do this because the Chinese used all sorts of biodegradable material to produce biogas, from all types of animal waste to human night soil. High caste technology drivers in India, Moulik argued in his book (Mao’s China), did not think like the less socially fragmented Chinese could think. Indian scientists focused on only cow dung and went as far as giving the name as gobar gas. The present Indian generation is not as fragmented as the previous generations were and will not object to the use of all bio waste for converting to biogas.

The second news item is about a school in Badalapur (Maharashtra) where the students are asked to sweep the school. Certain civil society leaders objected to this. What is wrong with the students sweeping the school? If one visits Japanese schools one will find that the students there do clean the school floors. No wonder, Japan, with higher population density than many places in India, is considered one of the cleanest countries in the world. Mahatma Gandhi would have definitely praised the students of the school in Badalapur.