In the public sphere, we are consistently awful. Arthur Koestler once said that breathing the air in Mumbai felt like “a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head.” I returned from Delhi recently, and there I felt like my head had been stuck in the exhaust of a truck. Hundreds of ministers and bureaucrats and workers travel around the city in hundreds of cars, each one in a single car with his or her own driver, each one sighing at the density of the traffic, each one complaining about the quality of the air, not one admitting to being part of the problem.

In 1901, Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, as we like to call him, was struck by how the delegates at a meeting of the Indian National Congress in what was then called Calcutta had made the toilets of the house they were living in too filthy to use. Then they turned a verandah into an open-air latrine. Young Gandhi chided them but was told that cleaning the toilets was the sweepers’ job.

Sweepers in India aren’t people who choose to be sanitation engineers. They’re people who are born to be sanitation engineers, and they are not supposed to hope to be anything else. They’re the outcasts of Indian society; “untouchables,” they used to be called, unseeables. Then Gandhi started calling them Harijans, People of God. They have since renamed themselves Dalits, the Broken People or the Oppressed People. Reservations — the Indian word for the affirmative action measures prescribed by the Constitution — may have helped many of them become doctors and lawyers and engineers, but most of the people who clean latrines in India still come from the Dalits. (The toilets on trains open right onto the tracks. After the train has passed, a worker, usually a Dalit, comes by and cleans up.) It is always going to be someone else’s job to keep things clean.

Dirt, it is said, is matter in the wrong place. Then what is the right place for it? We have garbage policies to deal with this, but they are not implemented. Although in Mumbai the government asks residents to segregate rubbish into wet and dry waste, municipal workers often mix everything into the same dumpster.

There are still rag pickers and raddiwallas, the men who buy your old papers, bottles and whatever else you don’t want. Some of these things go back into the system. Old clothes are bought in the cities and sold in the villages. Used electronics get refurbished and returned into the market. CDs are painted over with religious symbols and hung in cars. We continue to recycle and upcycle.