Sri Lanka, July 22 -- South Asia suffers from an ungainly reputation for being dirty and messy. That is not always an exaggeration, for the region is overpopulated; its explosive population growth in the past has burdened the states and thinned out per-capita social investment; and local government bodies have often done a sloppy job of keeping their precincts clean and organised.

Sri Lanka, by and large, has been an outlier to this particular South Asian ailment - though the locals have to be reminded of that by visiting Indian tourists - who, with genuine conviction or clickbait shenanigans, post rave social media reviews about how clean this country is. Such compliments ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, for they are often subje...