Why Are Indian Roads So Dirty and Who Is Really to Blame?

Every Indian has seen it. A family finishes chips in a moving car and throws the packet out of the window. Someone spits paan on a freshly painted wall. A pile of garbage sits at the corner of a market for days, slowly spreading onto the road. We shake our heads and say, “Indians have no civic sense.”

I used to believe that too. Now I think that explanation is too easy. It lets the real culprits off the hook.

Yes, Behaviour Matters

Let us be honest first. Many of us do litter. We throw wrappers on the ground because others do it, because there is no bin nearby, or because we think someone will clean it up. Spitting in public, dumping construction waste on roadsides and burning garbage are still common. No government can clean a country where millions of people make it dirty every day.

But if this were the whole story, how do we explain Indore?

The Indore Lesson

Indore has been named India’s cleanest city in the national Swachh Survekshan rankings eight times in a row, most recently in the 2024-25 survey. Its people are not genetically different from those in Bhopal, Lucknow or Kanpur. What changed was the system.

The city built a door-to-door garbage collection network, trained residents to separate wet and dry waste, set up processing plants, fined repeat offenders and kept collection vehicles running on time. Over a few years, people changed their habits because the system made the right behaviour easy and the wrong behaviour costly.

Meanwhile, the same national rankings put cities such as Madurai, Ludhiana, Chennai, Ranchi and Bengaluru near the bottom in their category in 2025. Some of these are rich, educated cities. Wealth clearly does not guarantee clean streets.

Who I Really Blame

• Municipal systems that do not work. In many cities, garbage collection is irregular, bins are missing or overflowing, and waste is simply moved from one dump to another. When people see that, they stop caring.
• No segregation at source. Mixed waste is harder to recycle or compost, so it piles up in landfills that catch fire and leak into groundwater.
• Weak enforcement. Fines for littering exist in many places but are rarely imposed. Without consequences, rules mean little.
• Poor urban planning. Open drains, broken footpaths and roads without proper edges collect dirt and plastic.
• Construction waste. Debris from buildings and road work is often dumped on roadsides and never cleared.
• Unclear responsibility. Roads may belong to one agency, drains to another and garbage collection to a third, so everyone blames someone else.

What Swachh Bharat Achieved

I do not want to dismiss progress. Since 2014, the Swachh Bharat Mission has built millions of toilets, made cleanliness a national conversation and pushed cities to compete in rankings. Many small towns are noticeably cleaner than a decade ago. Waste pickers, who do much of the actual recycling, are slowly getting more recognition.

But toilets and slogans are easier than running a reliable daily garbage system for 1.4 billion people. That needs money, trained staff, honest contracts and steady political attention long after the campaign headlines fade.

What Would Actually Work

• Bins every hundred metres in markets and busy streets, emptied regularly.
• Strict segregation with door-to-door collection, as Indore does.
• Visible fines and CCTV in littering hotspots.
• Ward-level accountability, so local officials are judged on cleanliness.
• Respect and pay for sanitation workers, who are the backbone of any clean city.
• School campaigns that make children the cleanliness police at home.

The Other View

Many people argue that systems mean nothing without personal responsibility, pointing out that Indians often follow rules perfectly in Singapore or Dubai. They say we should stop waiting for the government and start with ourselves. I agree that individuals must change. But the Singapore example actually supports my point: people behave well there because the system is strict, consistent and well run.

So who is to blame for dirty roads? All of us, but not equally. Citizens must stop littering. Yet the bigger responsibility lies with the governments and civic bodies we elect and pay taxes to. Indore has shown what is possible. The rest of India has no excuse left.