Indians Lack Civic Sense Or So We’re Told
Before we shame ourselves into “improvement,” maybe we should ask — what broke, who broke it and what we’ve stopped doing since.
The Feed We’re Consuming
Scroll through social media long enough and you’ll eventually run into them.
Posts, reels, commentaries, threads.
Someone throwing garbage out of a train window, someone spitting paan on a wall, a flooded street, a dirty railway station, a broken public toilet.
And then comes the avalanche of comments.
“Indians have no civic sense”, “This country doesn’t deserve good infrastructure”, “This is why India will never develop.”
Some of these posts are genuine. Some are rage-bait. Some are carefully cherry-picked clips designed to trigger shame and outrage. Some carry that old colonial gaze still alive in modern packaging — zooming in only on the poorest, messiest, most chaotic fragments of India to establish a conclusion about the entire civilization.
Many even call it what it is now: poverty porn.
And what is more unsettling is that this narrative is not sustained only by outsiders. A lot of Indians participate in it too. There are people outside India who genuinely dislike this country and want to damage its image globally. There are also insiders who, knowingly or unknowingly, amplify the same narrative constantly. And somewhere in between all this noise, a complex reality gets flattened into a very convenient conclusion:
Indians are uncivilized.
I disagree, because the conclusion itself is shallow.
“Indians Lack Civic Sense”
India did not lack civic sense. India lost the ecosystems that sustained it. And that did not happen naturally. (1)
Civic sense, at its core, is not merely about rules, etiquette, or fear of punishment. It is the ability to participate responsibly in shared life. To understand that your actions affect spaces, systems, people, animals, resources and consequences beyond yourself.
And that kind of participation cannot survive when people are disconnected from the systems they once helped sustain.
The existing systems in India were systematically dismantled under British colonial rule. Because self-sufficient societies are difficult to control.
Before this dismantling, villages and towns in India were not waiting for instructions from distant authorities for every aspect of daily life. They functioned through interdependence.
There are enough references, writings, oral histories and works — from texts like Gav Gada to the documentation and observations compiled by Dharampal,(2) that point toward how deeply self-sustaining Indian villages once were. Not utopian, but participatory, resilient, locally managed.
Water bodies were actively maintained(3) — desilted, cleaned, protected — by communities and occupational groups whose work was to ensure water remained usable and healthy. Not as charity, as part of a functioning system. There were lived distinctions — where you draw drinking water from, where you bathe, where you wash clothes.
Ghats were built, panpois, wells were built, public access to water was created and maintained by kings, local patrons and communities. The people who maintained these systems were sustained by the same ecosystem. Roads, wells, lakes, stepwells, public spaces, these things did not survive magically. They survived because responsibility was distributed.
The Dismantling of Self-Sustaining India
Then the British colonizers came. They saw the scale, sophistication and interdependence of these systems. And they dismantled them strategically, steadily, shrewdly.
We often discuss how education systems were altered under colonial rule. But local systems were disrupted too. Water management became centralized (4), occupational ecosystems weakened, decision-making moved farther away from communities, dependence on the state slowly replaced local participation.
And once people are removed from systems they sustain, something else quietly disappears:
Ownership.
Responsibility moves upward. Distance increases. Helplessness becomes habitual. And today, for everything, the people curse the government.
“The government is not doing anything.”
Sometimes that frustration is justified. Sometimes it is not. But what is the common citizen doing? The most ordinary, capable person can at least throw garbage where it belongs, not spit everywhere, not damage public spaces. Do we do even that consistently, consciously?
People Who Still Act
Take Gadge Maharaj. (Born: Debuji Zhingraji Janorkar. 23 February 1876 — 20 December 1956)
He did not begin with speeches. He picked up a broom. He would enter villages and start cleaning gutters, roads, public spaces — places everyone had gotten used to ignoring. People mocked him at first. Laughed at him.
He kept going. Slowly, people joined him. And after cleaning, he didn’t stop there. He decorated the cleaned spaces with rangoli and flowers. Then he would perform kirtans and speak about hygiene, dignity, responsibility.
Clean first. Beautify next. Speak after. No outrage performance. No superiority. Just action.
What Gadge Maharaj restored was not just cleanliness. He restored relationship. Relationship with public space, dignity, beauty, participation, and responsibility.
Or Dashrath Manjhi, who carved a road through a mountain instead of waiting forever for someone else to do it.
Or people like Malhar Kalambe and many young social media creators and volunteers today who clean beaches, restore spaces, revive stepwells, clean temples, repair neglected areas — not because someone assigned them the work, but because they refused to look away.
There are villages near Tadoba taking ownership of their own surroundings. Initiatives like Telugu Abbayi, Ramdoot Restores and countless smaller efforts that never become famous.
And what happens when people do such things? We applaud them. Share their videos. Call them inspiring. But think about that for a moment. Why is something so basic now considered extraordinary? Why does cleaning a public place need awards, validation, headlines? Because what was once normal has become rare. And instead of asking why that shift happened, we jump directly to insulting ourselves.
Yes, India has amplified many imported distortions too — patriarchy, unhealthy habits, public irresponsibility. We are not innocent victims floating through history untouched by our own actions.
But reducing everything to “Indians lack civic sense” is intellectually lazy.
It ignores history, it ignores systems, it ignores dismantling, it ignores responsibility, it ignores original accountability.
What Does “Civilized” Even Mean?
And then comes another layer — the constant comparison with the West. As if Western standards are the final measure of civilization.
“We are behind.”, “We are not there yet.”, “We need to become like them.”
But what does being “civilized” even mean? Indians eating with hands was once mocked as uncivilized. Today, mindful eating with hands is suddenly fashionable wellness culture. Many things once dismissed as “junglee” or “primitive” are now being rediscovered, repackaged and sold back as sustainable living.
Civilized behaviour is often confused with performative polish. Fluent English, expensive clothes, formal etiquette, sophisticated aesthetics — none of these automatically create responsibility toward shared spaces.
Meanwhile, an ordinary villager, farmer, child, sanitation worker or commuter may display far deeper civic awareness through small daily acts of participation and care. Because behaving civically is not about looking refined. It is about whether human beings can coexist in shared spaces without degrading them.
Swami Vivekananda once made an observation — whether one agrees fully or not — that Indians traditionally focused deeply on personal and household cleanliness, while Western societies developed public civic systems. His larger point was not about superiority but about imbalance: different civilizations emphasized different things.
And perhaps that is true. The West may have built stronger visible public systems in many places. But it also mastered hiding problematic waste far away from sight.
Modern cities often look clean because garbage is transported elsewhere. Out of sight is not the same as resolved.
There’s a Hindi saying:
“Jinke ghar sheeshe ke hote hain, woh dusron par pathhar nahi phenkte.” (जिनके घर शीशे के होते हैं, वो दूसरों पर पत्थर नहीं फेंकते). Those living in glass houses should not throw stones on others.
We can point fingers too. Those claiming moral superiority have many unresolved problems of their own. Every civilization has its failures. Every society has its blindness. The answer is not to play blame games between East and West.
The answer is synthesis.
If the best practices of different civilizations genuinely come together with honesty and intelligence, beautiful things can emerge. But blindly importing systems without understanding Indian realities will not help either.
What Is Garbage?
Which brings me to another question:
What is garbage?
Human and animal excreta are considered disgusting waste to us. But they are food and fuel for countless insects, bacteria, fungi, microbiomes.
A fallen fruit rots and becomes soil again, vegetable scraps thrown in a compost pit decompose naturally. Ash, cow dung, leaves, food remains — traditional societies had cycles for them.
For a very long time, what humans used was largely biodegradable. You could eat berries in a village, spit out the unwanted part onto the soil and nature would absorb it back into the cycle. That was not “littering” in the modern sense because decomposition systems existed around it.
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Now replace that world with plastic, synthetic fabric, electronic waste, chemicals, packaging. And keep the same habits. Of course it becomes a problem. Plastic does not disappear like a banana peel. And yet we continue producing mountains of materials that neither decompose easily nor fit into existing natural cycles.
Perhaps modern civic behaviour increasingly requires one difficult skill:
Understanding the afterlife of our actions.
Where does this go after I discard it?
Who cleans it?
Can nature absorb it?
Or am I simply pushing the burden onto someone else, somewhere else, later?
Then we panic about microplastics entering oceans, fish, turtles, cows, even our own bodies. And yes, those images are heartbreaking. We absolutely should respond. But are the producers of these materials equally worried?
Are industries producing plastic, chemical waste, fast fashion, and electronic waste working with the same urgency to create feasible, large-scale decomposition or recovery systems?
Or are ordinary people carrying the guilt for a crisis much larger than individual behaviour alone?
There was a time in Earth’s history when oxygen itself was toxic waste to many existing life forms. What we today consider essential for survival was once catastrophic for other organisms. Nature adapted, ecosystems shifted, and entirely new forms of life emerged.
Which makes one wonder:
What exactly is waste and for whom?
Perhaps today’s waste is tomorrow’s resource. Who knows? Human beings understand so little about the deeper mechanisms of nature anyway. We behave as though we are the supreme species with complete knowledge, while we still do not fully understand even our own bodies.
Nature has always transformed things in ways we once thought impossible. That does not mean we become careless. It means we become humble. And maybe patient enough to work with nature instead of endlessly against it.
Learned Helplessness Was Manufactured
A few days ago, I was travelling in a local train
An elegant-looking elderly woman sat beside me. She seemed educated, polished, fluent in English. She took a used ticket from her purse, folded it, and casually threw it out of the train window. I watched her do it. Sometimes people become slightly uncomfortable when they realize someone saw them doing something uncivic.
She did not react at all. Then she took another ticket and tried to throw that too. This time I quietly took the ticket from her hand and gestured for her to keep it in her purse. She looked genuinely surprised.
“I don’t usually do this,” she said. “I forgot today.”
I told her, “No worries. Keep it in your purse or I’ll keep it in mine and throw it later.”
She quietly kept it back. That incident stayed with me. I’ve started carrying a paper or plastic bag whenever I travel now, especially by train or bus. Not because I think I’m changing the nation. But because I kept noticing those tiny moments where a person is just about to throw something outside.
Sometimes all it takes is interruption. “Don’t throw it. Keep it — or give it to me.” And surprisingly, most people listen. And what gives me the most hope is children. So many children automatically keep wrappers in their pockets or bags without anyone telling them.
Which means this is not something Indians are incapable of learning.
It is something that needs positive reinforcement.
After that train incident, I put up a question on my social media stories and posts. At least a thousand people saw it. Barely ten responded.
I asked:
“When you see someone littering or behaving uncivilly in public, do you say something? If not, why? Fear? Past experiences? News? Stories? Movies? Conditioning?”
The answers were fascinating.
Some said fear.
Some said there are no clear social rules in India about public behaviour.
Some said they used to stop people but eventually gave up because “what’s the use?”
Some said they still intervene whenever they can.
And honestly, that “what’s the use?” mentality is everywhere now.
That deep lethargy, that emotional unbotheredness, that feeling that nothing will change anyway.
People see garbage and walk past it, see public damage and shrug, see dysfunction and immediately detach themselves from responsibility.
Not always because they are bad people. But because generations of people have slowly been conditioned into helplessness.
And I do not think this helplessness emerged naturally.
It was hammered into the Indian psyche through colonial dismantling.
When communities lose ownership over systems, when participation is replaced by dependency, when decisions move farther and farther away from ordinary people, something dangerous happens:
People stop believing their actions matter.
Under British colonial rule, local systems were steadily weakened while making them dependent on the centralized systems.
Over time, people who once maintained, protected, repaired, organized, and collectively participated in public life were reduced to subjects waiting for authority. Responsibility moved upward, power moved outward, participation weakened and eventually helplessness became culture.
A learned passivity.
A constant feeling of:
“What difference will my effort make?”, “Why should I bother?”, “Nothing changes in this country anyway.”
And then I remembered a line from B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat.
Bhishma says:
“Kai baar manushya apni vivashta ko hi apna kartavya maan leta hai.” (कई बार मनुष्य अपनी विवशता को ही अपना कर्तव्य मान लेता है। ) Sometimes human beings begin treating their helplessness itself as duty.
That line stayed with me. Because somewhere along the way, many of us normalized helplessness itself.
We accepted that public spaces belong to no one. We accepted that responsibility belongs elsewhere. We accepted that participation is pointless. And maybe that is what needs to change most. Because when public spaces emotionally belong to no one, deterioration becomes inevitable. People are far less likely to protect what they no longer feel connected to.
What we need is the belief that our actions matter at all.
The Indian Way Forward
What is the Indian way of doing this? Not as nostalgia. Not as chest-thumping. But as living intelligence.
What systems from elsewhere are actually sustainable?
Which of them fit Indian realities?
How do we Indianize useful systems instead of merely copying them?
What do we actually need — not for optics, not for comparison, but for life here?
Because the real question is no longer:
“Why are Indians like this?”
The real question is:
What broke?
Who benefited from that breaking?
What can we rebuild?
And what responsibility am I personally willing to take — without waiting, without performing, without outsourcing?
But perhaps before all of that, there is something even more fundamental we need to let go of:
The constant self-diminishing, the inherited low self-worth, the low self-respect, the feeling that we are perpetually behind, perpetually lacking, perpetually waiting for validation from somewhere else.
Because a civilization that keeps looking at itself through borrowed eyes eventually forgets how to recognize its own strengths. Maybe that is one of the deepest crises India faces today: disconnection from its own sense of worth. And a society constantly operating from low self-respect eventually stops believing it can shape its surroundings meaningfully at all.
And that does not mean blind nationalism or denial.
It means seeing clearly — both the fractures and the possibilities — without collapsing into shame every single time.
Outrage is easy, mockery is easy, commenting is easy. Participation is not.
But maybe that is exactly where the future begins. And honestly? I have hope. A lot of hope. Especially from the coming generations.
They have enough sass, enough sharpness, enough boldness. Many of them are more expressive, more willing to ask questions, more open about mental and emotional realities, more compassionate toward differences, and far less afraid to initiate things on their own.
Hopefully, they will use it not just to ridicule everything but to rebuild something worth inheriting.
( (1) Historians document large‑scale ecological disruption under colonial policy: forest reservations and state takeovers; conversion of diverse forests to monocultures; cash‑crop imperatives; canal colonies replacing agro‑pastoral systems; and legal centralization of water control. Sources: Rangarajan (TOI, 2023); The Print (Western Ghats, 2018); Northern India Canal and Drainage Act, 1873 (Preamble).
(2) Dharampal’s synthesis of Madras Presidency Collector reports (1822–26) shows 25–35% of cultivated land was revenue‑free, assigned to support local administration, police, irrigation, and education — indicating institutionalized village‑level public responsibilities. Sources: Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree (Vol. III); Collector returns, Madras Presidency (1820s).
(3) Pre‑colonial/early modern irrigation records note systematic annual desilting; local villages performed desilting work, with labor requisitioned for main channels; institutions like kudimaramathu (tank‑maintenance chiefs) managed allocation and maintenance. Sources: NMML Occasional Paper on Irrigation; studies on kudimaramathu in Puducherry; traditional water‑systems syntheses.
(4) The 1873 Act explicitly declares the State’s right to ‘use and control for public purposes’ the water of all rivers, streams, and lakes in Northern India; water‑rates were recoverable as land‑revenue. Source: Northern India Canal and Drainage Act, 1873 (Act VIII of 1873), Preamble & Sections 5–6; Parts IV–V.)
