The living room vs the sidewalk

The home smells fresh because of the incense stick and phenyl-scrubbed marble. Shoes are neatly aligned outside the door, and the floors of the house are so clean that you could literally eat your food off them. Everyone puts so much effort into cleaning their house and keeping household items in their exact places. By this act, one takes immense pride.
But the moment one steps out of the house, everything shifts. The window rolls down of a gleaming car to flick a chocolate wrapper onto the road. There is always a “black spot” at the corner of some areas where garbage is piling up, and instead of feeling outrage, one adds their own bag to the heap because “everyone else is doing it.”
This is the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) paradox. In India, it is ritualised that inside the gate is mine, sacred, clean, and worthy of respect while outside the gate is no man’s land. Why is the hand that polishes the deity in the living room the same hand that litters the street outside?
People often blame a “lack of education” for India’s civic mess, but yearly data tells a different story. It isn’t the poor who are defacing the new Vande Bharat trains; it is the “educated” middle class stealing headphones and stuffing seat pockets with orange peels. It is the man driving an expensive car who thinks the open road is his personal dustbin.
People complain about stray dogs and cattle but refuse to acknowledge that these animals are only there because kitchen waste is dumped in open plastic bags. People demand world-class infrastructure, yet treat it with the respect of a junkyard.
The root cause of this behaviour is, firstly, the accountability gap. In the public square, breaking the rules has become common. When a person realises that spitting on a heritage wall or littering from a moving vehicle carries no social or legal penalty, the deterrent vanishes. Rule-followers are mocked as idealistic, while rule-breakers are rewarded with convenience. This behaviour has created a society where indiscipline is the path of least resistance.
Secondly, there is the “Someone Else Will Clean It” myth. For generations, the burden of cleanliness has been historically outsourced to specific social classes, and currently, it is expected that city services will do it. By viewing public hygiene as a service provided by the state rather than a duty performed by the individual, the citizen adopts a renter’s mindset. They treat national infrastructure like a hotel room they never intend to visit again, ignoring the fact that “Sarkari” property is funded by their own hard-earned taxes.
Ultimately, the nation falls victim to the Tragedy of the Commons. Because the park, the sidewalk, and the river belong to everyone, the individual assumes they belong to no one. Poor civic sense is the most expensive tax the people of India are paying, and no one even realises it.
In today’s time, urban flooding is no longer a “natural” disaster; it is a man-made one. Every time a city is paralysed for three days during the monsoon, it costs the economy billions and it all starts with a single plastic bag everyone thought wouldn’t matter.
Open littering of plastics, food waste, and construction debris is common in cities, resulting in clogged drains and becoming primary drivers of respiratory and vector-borne diseases. Despite the availability of public toilets, open defecation and public spitting in areas are increasing the spread of infections such as diarrhoea, tuberculosis, and respiratory illnesses. One might spend thousands on an air purifier to clean their home but still breathe air contaminated by the garbage pile a block away.
India is upgrading its hardware, the roads, the trains, the airports. But the hardware is useless if the software (our civic sense) is corrupted. It’s time to realise that the sidewalk is just an extension of the living room. Until we stop treating our country like a free dustbin, we will never truly be a “developed” nation, no matter how many high-speed rails we build. The change doesn’t start with a new law; it starts at the threshold of your front door.