The Indian bureaucracy only treats sanitation as an emergency when there is a potential for a tragic headline.
In a masterclass of civic engagement, a woman in Meerut successfully bypassed years of municipal apathy by reporting that a human being had fallen into a neglected, sludge-filled drain. The report triggered an unprecedented 'war footing' response: police and municipal teams arrived with JCBs and spent three hours cleaning the entire stretch of the sewer. Upon finding zero bodies but a perfectly clean drain, officials realized they had been 'pranked' into doing their actual jobs. The woman has since been hailed as a revolutionary for discovering that the only way to get a drain cleaned in India is to claim it is currently consuming a citizen.