Like him or not, you have to feel sorry for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. He is not merely preparing India for the future, he is sinking under the accumulated rubbish and filth that successive governments have failed to tackle in the 67 years since independence.
When he came to power a year ago, Mr Modi knew he had to clean up the Ganges, the Hindu holy river. Everyone knew that the Ganges had become a fetid sewer on account of the untreated human sewage and industrial waste that had been dumped in it for decades.
Mr Modi made it a key policy to clean the river. It was a huge job, of course, given that the river covers 2,500 kilometres.
But even before he gets started, a new report by the Central Pollution Control Board has said that the number of polluted rivers in India has risen in the past five years from 121 to 275.
The report blames increased sewage from a rising population. Indians generate many millions of litres of sewage every day and the country’s treatment facilities are unable to cope.
There lies the rub. What have the governments of India's constituent states been doing all these years? Why haven't they set up more sewage treatment plants?
Do they not plan for their cities and their development? Did they never consider the rising population and the attendant implications for sewage?
Sometimes it seems the people in charge of India are in a drug-induced torpor, able to move only in slow motion. Take the decision to clean the Ganges. It is long overdue but the labyrinthine and inert bureaucracy will slow its execution.
But it’s more than red tape; it’s a psychological condition. Indians act only in extremis, when the problem escalates into a do-or-die crisis, when their backs are up against the wall and they have absolutely no choice but to act.
That is what happened with the Ganges.
Frankly it’s been neglected for so long it’s anyone guess if the river will ever be clean. The same thing has happened with the issue of New Delhi’s air quality.
For years, no one bothered. Reports and warnings were ignored. It’s only now that the authorities are paying any attention, when residents are having difficulty breathing and the World Health Organisation has declared Delhi to be the most polluted city on the planet with levels of dangerous small particulate matter six times the WHO’s recommended maximum.
Of course, ordinary Indians are to blame in equal measure. Sanjay Singh, a boatman in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges, told me that all the bathers in the river ignore the prominent signs on the ghats prohibiting them from soaping themselves in the water or shampooing their hair.
“If I go up to them and point to the signs, they just say ‘who are you?’ and continue polluting the river they hold sacred,” he said.
What’s missing is civic sense and pride, a desire to play one’s part in keeping the surroundings clean, concern for future generations and a sense of collective responsibility. It’s each for himself.
As a result, towns and cities all over India are hideously, irredeemably ugly, with not a single pleasing edifice, surface or exterior. But no one even notices because many Indians have lost their aesthetic sense, their appreciation of cleanliness and beauty.
So, blackened buildings with broken windows, peeling plaster, a tangled mass of electricity lines, piles of rubbish on broken pavements and a decrepit landscape are the norm.
It was not always thus. The ancient cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were models of town planning with granaries, public baths, a town hall, wide streets, reservoirs and a drainage system.
The absence of urban planning, bureaucratic sloth and flaws in the culture mean that there isn’t just the Ganges to clean but 275 rivers.
Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi