All of this is particularly troubling given the enormous sums of money involved in the Swachh Bharat Mission. In its first report on the campaign, in November 2014, the World Bank said that “over the 1999-2013 period,” India’s central and state governments “are reported to have expended INR 150 billion (USD2.4 billion)”—that is, Rs 15,000 crore. By all accounts, much of that money was wasted. The Swachh Bharat Mission proposes to spend around 15 times that in just five years.

A 2014 report by the institute, based on a survey of “sanitation quality, use, access and trends,” found that “over 40% of households with a working latrine have at least one member who defecates in the open,” and that many respondents believed there are benefits to defecating in the open. The report emphasised that latrine construction alone is not enough to change open-defecation patterns, and that “If the government were to build a latrine for every rural household without one, without changing sanitation preferences, most people in our sample states where it is most common would still defecate in the open.”

The only clear change in the life of the settlement since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission, Choudhary told me, was that the incidence of malaria and dengue had gone up here since a trash-processing project was built in the vicinity as part of the campaign.

Right at the foot of the mountain of garbage is the Muslim ghetto of Bombay Hotel. The ghetto includes the settlement of Citizen Nagar, home to people permanently displaced by the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. On paper, Citizen Nagar simply does not exist. The state government refuses to recognise the existence of settlements of pogrom survivors, and insists that all of them have returned to their original homes.