I've been considering a theory on modern India and why it's so filthy and chaotic. I think it may stem from the campaign to abolish or at least diminish the caste system. For most of India's history caste was absolute. Everyone had a job to do and that was their unchangeable lot in life. Then the British took over and the system weakened a bit, Gandhi campaigned to abolish caste, then after independence the new Indian government created special exceptions and privileges for the lower castes similar to western civil rights laws. The system isn't gone but the stated agenda of the society is to make the castes more equal.
The idea of social mobility was introduced to a culture where it had been unimaginable for thousands of years. This didn't lead Indians to think "Yay, everyone is equal now and there's no oppression!" What they concluded instead was "Sweet, now I can actually become a higher caste without having to die and reincarnate first!" Indians think that the caste boundaries are now permeable so they're all scrambling to assert themselves as members of a high caste. The main way to do this is through success in business within corporate models imported from the West.
With the lines of caste blurred, everyone now wants to be one of cool guys who gets to order people around. Doing something like cleaning the streets or looking both ways as you cross the train tracks marks you as one of the lowly servant castes so everyone avoids doing it. For the same reason, pajeets will act rude and arrogant and do a sloppy job of everything to prove their high status. It reflects a view of how rich and successful people behave from the perspective of an illiterate peasant in a grass hut.
My guess is that centuries ago when caste was absolute, many more people belonging to the lower castes were willing to do jobs upkeeping things; India was also much less urbanized so there were less urban areas to keep tidy. Now everyone but the Dalits wants to larp as a higher caste and the entire framework underpinning the culture is crumbling. That's why the country is so amoral and treacherous, as that one article said "all the words for virtues are imported from Persian or Turkish." In traditional Indian culture, you don't act for the sake of "doing right," you do the things because they are part of the job you're born with. So blurring the lines of caste means dissolving the entire moral foundation of the culture.
Tl;dr they didn't evolve to have principles they base their actions on, they evolved to be told what to do by infallible superiors. When you take away that absolute hierarchy the culture falls apart.
I made a post about it before that got swallowed by a forum reset, I think, but yes - caste concerns are a primary issue for hygiene in India.
This article from 2014 encapsulates it:
At about 9:00 a.m. each day, Sudha Devi walks up to a gated house in India’s capital, removes her shoes and heads inside. She’s under strict orders: Don’t touch anything but the toilet. Immediately after Devi’s done cleaning, a housekeeper of a higher social rank scrubs down the entire house. As a member of the Dalit caste once known as “untouchables,” Devi is used to handling messes other Indian maids won’t go near. While those housekeepers earn about $100 (6,300 rupees) a month, Devi makes about 10 rupees per toilet. “Because of my caste, everyone leaves the dirtiest work to me,” Devi said while walking door-to-door in Safdarjung Enclave, an area less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the president’s house. “Most of those jobs include cleaning up after other people and doing work everyone else refuses to do.”
Devi’s services as a toilet cleaner are in demand largely because some housekeepers who aren’t Dalits won’t clean them. Asha, a maid in a Delhi neighborhood popular with expatriates and restaurateurs, is one of them. “I don’t clean toilets or carry trash -- there is another woman in the area who’s of low caste who does it,” said Asha, who goes by one name. “It’s impure for me and my family to work in such filth.”
There is a long standing tradition in India for something called "manual scavenging" ("हाथ से मैला ढोना") which involves cleaning out pit latrines or picking up faeces on train tracks by hand without PPE, reserved for the lowest of the dalits, the halalkhors (Muslims) and Valmikis (Hindus). People who perform this work are called "Safai Karamchari" (सफाई कर्मचारी), basically waste collectors. Many of them are women.
The reasons behind this are quite complicated but basically seem to boil down to the idea that despite possibly having the world's oldest pour-flush systems found in excavations of the Indus Valley civilisation, arrival of nomadic tribes meant the practice died out. The
Manusmriti dictated where it was permissible to go to the loo - "At least 40 hands distance is to be observed while urinating near a river or temple and defecation should be at least at a distance of 400 hands". The
Nāradasmṛti defined one of the roles of slaves was to clean refuse without complaint (they'd be given land to live on, but only if they fulfilled their duties).
Then when the Mughals arrived, in order to ensure purdah of their women, they built dry latrines in their palaces which then required hiring people to clean those toilets - including in communal buildings, so driving it beyond the remit of a household slave. Everyone else apparently gave up on respecting a certain distance from temples and rivers when defecating, because there were "night soil" cleaners. The Raj then basically observed that the locals already had a group of people who were doing this work and so formally hired people to clean their dry latrines, entrenching it further. Controversially, Gandhi made visitors to his ashram take turns cleaning the latrines in order to dissolve the idea of caste stigma, but it didn't stick.
In 1993 India passed "The Employment of Safai Karamcharis and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993", which made it illegal to employ manual scavengers or build dry latrines. 20 years later, India passed "The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013" which essentially made it more illegal to employ manual scavengers, and to make it so that anyone who owned an "insanitary latrine" had 21 days to either turn it into something that was sanitary (like a water flush latrine) or demolish it. People identified as manual scavengers were to be given a residential plot of land and one member of their family could receive paid training in a "livelihood skill". There's some "cutesy" social media posts from around this time, too, tying in with Modhi's Swachh Bharat Mission to end open defecation by 2019.
"Manual Scavenging is a crime! Punishment for violation. Imprisonment up to 5 years, heavy fines. Sanitation heroes deserve a bright future"
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to judge how effective this has been, given they had to pass this law twice (in addition to earlier laws prohibiting the practice of untouchability).
Certainly this article from 2023 gives an idea;
In 2021, a federal minister told parliament, external that the government had identified 58,098 manual scavengers in the country through surveys, but also added that there was "no report of practice of manual scavenging currently in the country". But according to the Safai Karmachari Andolan, which works to eliminate manual scavenging, there are more than 770,000 such workers.
But effectively, while dalits are more able to get employment in areas that are better due to laws that have continued to try and ban caste discrimination - tried, as noted previously dalits are still getting murdered for crimes as diverse as "going to a hair salon" or "owning sunglasses" - anyone who isn't that caste doesn't want to be associated with the untouchables, and that extends to literally just cleaning a regular plumbed toilet. This ties in with the caste superiority of Brahmins, who think taking care of that sort of thing is beneath them. For example
in 2017 a gang of 15 youths lynched a rickshaw driver for daring to humiliate two of them for pissing in the street (he basically offered them each a penny to go use the public toilet they were stood outside).
The Swachh Bharat Mission did start to see a reduction in open defecation according to (massaged) government figures, mostly through building toilets, and especially legislating to require places like schools build women's toilets (they often only have a men's toilet).
But a lot of the toilets aren't plumbed flush toilets and so -
Lack of water supply will push people to revert to their old ways of defecation, that is, in the open. It is because there is a lack of piped water supply especially in rural areas, people use the toilets constructed for them, for other purposes. Speaking of his travels across many parts of rural India, Professor Baruah expresses that, “I have seen people use toilets for storing grains and other materials.” This leads one to believe that building these toilets then becomes moot. It is not only a waste of funds but also of time and space.
“Open defecation is very much a part of peoples’ cultures.” says Professor Barauh and goes on to explain that “in many places kids grow up seeing their families and people going to fields together in the mornings. Early on in your life you get enrolled in this practice.” It becomes clear then that it is a set behavioural pattern that needs to be understood and changed. Open defecation may also prove to be a community act and this is because “every morning people walk to fields together and get the space to talk, converse and share things.”. Defecating in the open is also convenient especially with family sizes mostly being large in rural India and one small toilet may not be sufficient for the same. According to Professor Quaiser, Head of the Sociology Department at Jamia Millia Islamia University “Throughout history, people have had differential patterns of defecation and that has nothing to do with the existence of lavatories.” In other words, building toilets is not enough. Professor Baurah also spoke about the need for massive awareness drives that should be undertaken by State actors as well as non-governmental organisations. He also added that these campaigns should be aimed especially at men. This is because “in most of rural India, men are the decision makers in the family and they are the ones who need toilets the least.”
well 
