I don't get it

My Indian counterparts maintain the perplexing habit of washing the street outside their homes on a daily basis.

When I was living in and near South Indian villages it made sense; the roads, mostly dirt, grew dusty after baking all day in the sun and the daily rush-hour from field or factory to home meant vast clouds of heavy grime floating in the air - choking to the lungs while walking or driving through it. Sprinkling water on the roads outside houses and shops meant a cleaner atmostphere for everyone and kept freshly hung laundry from dirtying and thickening with the kicked up mess.
But here, in Bangalore, we live on a paved (albeit badly) road and yet the watchman will stand outside our house with a hose of running water and nicely fill the ever-expanding potholes until they are transofrmed into brackish mud puddles. Being thorough in his task, he goes on wetting the surrounding pavement as well for no evident purpose.
Twice a day he does this, waking up with the sun to water the blacktop and returning at the end of the day to repeat the process.

Before I met Hamid I rented a small flat attached to a very large house inhabited by an older divorced businessman and his sweetly aged mother. My bedroom windows, floor-to-ceiling french doors of paper-thin glass, faced the long gated, covered driveway next to the main house. Each and every morning I would hear the old woman emerge from her front door with a great fanfare, toting bucket and whisk broom in hand to clean the drive from top to bottom. It was maddening to be awakened each day at five a.m. by the scraping 'whish whish' of her seemingly endless activity, and even more so for the lack of obvious necessity for this tradition.

I've been standing on the balcony musing to myself over the freshly filled puddles below - and I just don't get it.