Had he committed his offense on the street above the station, it would almost certainly have gone unnoticed: in much of urban India, expectorating in public places was, and remains, commonplace. But the platforms and cars of Calcutta Metro, India’s first subway system, only a few years old at the time of this incident, were spanking clean—and among commuters, this aroused a sense of pride and responsibility. Those two citizens were prepared to delay their own journey in order to keep the platform spotless.
Why, one of her visitors asked, sardonically, “Is there a fine? As it happens, there is a fine for littering in stations, and it would have been easy enough for her to say so. But she said this: “Yeh fine ka sawal nahin, safai ka sawal hai.” (It is not a question of a fine but of cleanliness.)
If broken windows in a neighborhood remain unmended, it leads some members of the community to think that it is acceptable to break windows. Likewise, studies on littering show that people are much more careless with their trash in dirty places than in clean ones. The obverse of the theory is that if a city maintains clean public places, the public will take it upon itself to keep them that way.
This is all the more remarkable since the majority of Dubai’s residents come from places where filthy public spaces are the norm—countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Egypt and the Philippines. “People coming from places where civic sense is almost nonexistent land at DXB, and there’s this immediate transformation,” said Sunil Kanchan, a native of Bombay who has lived in Dubai for 30 years. “The same guys who were dropping their tissues on the floor of the plane are now looking for dustbins in the arrivals terminal.”
But it is too facile to ascribe cleanliness to enforcement alone. Research shows that, over time, people stop littering even when there’s no risk of being caught and punished, because it feels wrong. That was true in Singapore, and it is true in Dubai. “Maybe for the first few weeks or months, you think about the penalties for breaking the law,” remarked Kanchan. “Then you start thinking, ‘This is my town, it’s a pretty clean town… I’d like it to stay that way.”
Dubai and a question of civility
One of the committee’s first initiatives involves honoring people who display simple acts of civility, including but not limited to keeping public spaces clean. “If a resident makes an effort to improve the quality of life for us all, that should be celebrated,” added al Nazari.
Back to Calcutta. Nearly four decades on, the subway system there remains cleaner than the city at large, but some of the behavior from the surface has begun to seep down into the underground. So much so that the authorities have been obliged to employ anti-littering squads to try to prevent spitting and other unclean behavior. If commuters won’t take that responsibility upon themselves, the threat and enforcement of fines will have to serve the purpose.
Dubai, which already has fines and enforcement, knows that these aren’t enough, which is why it is now supplementing those tools with some social engineering. It is an exercise that other cities ought to watch closely.
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