Can Indians be persuaded to do their own dirty work?

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission – launched on a public holiday marking Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday – will seek to address some of the difficulties facing the hundreds of millions of Indians who lack access to adequate sanitation.

According to reports, The Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants every home and school to have access to a toilet by 2019, in time for the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth.

Part of the problem he faces is in convincing the country that cleaning is everyone’s responsibility, rather than that of the Dalits – those born to a low caste.

He appeared himself with a broom in a Delhi neighbourhood occupied by members of the Valmiki caste, whose lot in life is traditionally “manual scavenging”, a euphemism for clearing other people’s faeces, Reuters reported.

And he ordered government workers including his ministers came to work on Thursday to sweep offices and clean toilets.

Modi (above, left) said: “Often we assume the job of cleaning up belongs to safai karmacharis and don’t bother to clean,” Modi said referring to cleaners.

“Don’t we all of have a duty to clean the country?”

Less than a third of India’s 1.2 billion people have access to sanitation and more than 186,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, according to the charity WaterAid.

“Modi will have to deal with society’s failure to liberate the Dalits (low caste people) from the demeaning profession if he wants India to be as clean as Singapore,” said Pravin Panchal, a researcher at the Environmental Sanitation Institute think-tank.

In May, the United Nations said half of India’s people defecate outside – putting people at risk of cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid.

The resulting diseases and deaths, mostly among the poor, cause major losses. The World Bank in 2006 estimated that India was losing 6.4 percent of gross domestic product annually because of poor sanitation.

To be successful, prime minister Modi will have to banish the widespread belief in the countryside that it is unclean to defecate inside.

US group Human Rights Watch, in a report in August, documented cases of authorities recruiting people from low castes to clean open defecation grounds. The group found people were often coerced into do the work with threats of reprisals.

The practice is most common in small-town India, where people from castes still considered “untouchable” clean waste from toilets which do not have modern flush systems.

Caste-based discrimination was banned in India in 1955, but Dalits face prejudice in every sector from education to employment.

In just one example this week, the Dalit chief minister of Bihar state, Jitan Ram Manjhi, said he was told a temple in the state was “purified” after he visited it last month.