The idea of a Nobel Prize for filth — awarded for the advancement of disgust, rather than peace, literature or physics — would alarm the Swedes. But India’s minister for environment and forests lives and works in a less squeamish part of the world, where such things can be imagined with less effort. He has publicly declared that Indian cities would win the Nobel for filth hands down: “Our cities are the dirtiest cities of the world.” Jairam Ramesh was not pronouncing a statistically proven truth, but expressing an impressionistic consensus. There is no point in being patriotic and touchy about something so self-evident. It is the combined failure of governance and right-acting citizenship that makes Indian cities what they are. Civic authorities and governments are made up of the same sort of people who live in the cities and towns and make them dirty. So misgovernance in, say, domestic waste management and a general lack of civic sense cannot be kept apart from each other: each informs the other. The official excuse for inefficiency and corruption in these matters is, of course, poverty, over-population and migration. But if the poor and the homeless generate filth in Indian cities and refuse to remain out of sight and smell, then the thing to do is to get to the bottom of why their lives lack shelter, water, sanitation and drainage. One is then brought back to the question of administration and governance.

To breathe toxic air, to walk past mountains of garbage, to be cooped up in a fatally unclean hospital ward, to attend classes in a dirty campus, to use filthy public toilets are taken as a matter of course in Indian urban and suburban life. As long as a certain culturally specific notion of personal space and the purity of one’s own being are not violated, the condition of public spaces is a matter of collective unconcern for ordinary as well as important Indians. Colonial rule did not make much of a difference to these double standards, so it might be unrealistic to expect modernity, with its globalized and liberalized lifestyle, to suddenly bring about what imperial hygiene and civility could not achieve. In Calcutta, lethargy, corruption, politicking and filth are part of the same cultural tradition. So its mayor — who is better at being social than being mayoral — would perhaps not mind the honour and the excitement of going up to receive urban India’s very own Nobel.