Three players are engaging each other in a national game. The land’s masses constitute the major party, diverse as they are on every conceivable count, not to ignore the languages they use to express their thoughts and opinions about others, unmindful of however unsavoury their ways of making their presence noticed in public domain. The second party is the administration, inappropriately called government making laws in the form of Gram Panchayats, Town Panchayats, Urban Local Bodies including Municipalities as well as Corporations, State Legislative Assemblies as well as State Legislative Councils (barring seven States) and the country’s Parliament comprising Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. All these bodies comprise members elected by eligible voters in addition to a few nominated members. The third party in the game, being an important wing of the government, is the law implementing machinery, mainly the Police force. Now, the stage is set for the game to kickstart and which players grab the place on the victory stand is no big deal to guess. For the uninformed, the winner is the mass of land, majority of whom don’t care a hoot about the laws. But the other two parties don’t seem to be giving up.

There being many events in the aforementioned threesome game, for the purpose of this column, the garbage game is taken for illustration, only because it is hogging attention across the country.

The garbage game has its brief history of five years since the launch of what is familiar to all as Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, to mean clean India movement. The movement doesn’t seem to be moving either in its intended direction or at the desired pace, taking the case of Mysuru, which took its residents by surprise when it was accorded top billing as the country’s cleanest city, not once but twice on the trot. If it has slipped to third place from the top in the latest verdict by the authorities, the surprise element is understandable. The top brass in the city’s civic body having reportedly given the reason for Mysuru losing in the garbage game, one is prompted to recollect a lesson in Kannada textbook of yesteryears at school-level namely Marali yathnava maadu (try again).

Let us not shy away from the outlook of the majority of Mysureans towards the obnoxious mass of trash they toss about apart from spitting and urinating in the open. The civic body and the law-enforcing wing have no chance of escaping trash trouble bugging both players in the ongoing garbage game.