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India: aspiring super power but millions have no lavatory

With Special arrangement and Copyright OBSERVER NEWS SERVICE

By Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi

Hundreds of millions of Indians have no lavatory at home, leaving them no choice but to defecate in the open. Rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh is spearheading a campaign to rid India of this degrading practice by 2012.

DESPITE all the hype these days about India as a new economic superpower, it has yet to fulfil the dream of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: ’The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.’

 With the country’s greater economic prosperity, Indian plumbers and electricians have mobile phones, the IT industry is famed, and glitzy shopping malls are sprouting like weeds. But take a train ride past any town early in the morning and you will see slum-dwellers lining the tracks, bare-bottomed, doing their business. Hundreds of millions of Indians have no toilet at home, leaving them no choice but to defecate in the open.

 In villages, where the vast majority of Indians live, only 22 per cent have toilets. The rest use the fields.

 But one man is on a mission to end open defecation. Rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh is bullying, cajoling, and taunting villagers into building toilets.

 His goal is to rid India of this degrading practice by 2012.

 Singh’s efforts are part of the Rural Sanitation Programme. This was launched by the government in 1999 but languished until Singh recently took it up and breathed a new urgency into it.

 He has bludgeoned the finance ministry into giving him US$160 million for 2006, an increase from $32 million in 2003-4, to use as subsidies for villages that promise to build community toilets.

 ’We have to eradicate the diseases that come from open defecation. Human waste lying around ends up polluting water sources, causing all kinds of sanitation-related illnesses,’ said Singh.

 About 600,000 children under five are estimated to die every year from diarrhoea. Some 30 million people in rural areas suffer from sanitation-related diseases. Some families suffer from dysentery all year round.

 For rural women, the simple act of relieving themselves is traumatic. It’s not just the fear of snakes lurking in the fields. They often have to walk long distances - over a kilometre - to find a secluded place.

 Around some villages in north India the scrubland is disappearing, leaving no cover, so they often have to squat by the road.

 ’When a car passes and the headlight shines on them, they have to get up hastily. It’s just awful,’ said Kulwant Atwal, a sanitation social worker in Hoshiarpur, Punjab.

 These days, Singh’s officials, filled with missionary zeal, roam the countryside to see which designated villages have fulfilled their promise. Villages where open defecation has been consigned to history are rewarded and feted.

 But Singh also wields the stick. He has said all candidates standing for elections to village councils must be able to prove they have a toilet at home, or risk disqualification.

 ’What kind of example do they set by defecating in the open themselves? They have to set a good example on hygiene, given their authority,’ says Singh.

 Daljit Basra, a farmer’s wife in Khanna village in Punjab, says that having a community toilet near her home has transformed her life. ’I used to have to walk a long way to find a place where no one could see me. It meant getting up early. Now there’s no rush in the mornings,’ she says.

 The advertising campaign devised by Singh’s publicity department is also creative. Advertisements show grooms shopping for brides and rejecting those who do not have toilets in their homes.

 Oddly enough, the reason people in the countryside relieve themselves in the open is not invariably poverty. In some better-off states such as Tamil Nadu in the south and Punjab in the north, families can afford to build toilets but choose not to.

 In Tamil Nadu, surveys show that over 40 per cent of homes have televisions but only 14 per cent have toilets. In Punjab, 70 per cent of rural homes have a TV but fewer than 40 per cent have toilets.

 Clearly, a toilet is not a priority for some families. Social workers say that some villagers, particularly men, like doing their business al fresco, in communion with nature.

 ’Theyconsider it a bit ’namby pamby’ to do their business inside the house. They prefer to be more ’macho’ and go out in the fields,’ said Atwal.

 This partly explains the bizarre phenomenon of some homes in Punjab villages having toilets that are locked and used only for emergencies such as a bout of gasto-enteritis.

 Otherwise, the thunderbox is kept locked and sealed off. It is opened and shown off on special occasions - like the family silver - only when guests come.

 Singh’s toilet-building frenzy is showing results. The Total Sanitation Campaign has built 20 million household toilets since 1999. Government figures show that rural sanitation coverage has increased from 22 per cent in 2001 to 38 per cent in 2006.

 It means, however, that about 500 million rural Indians are still squatting in the open every day.

 If they happen to be in one of Singh’s designated villages, they had better watch out for intruders. Before a village can qualify for an award, his men snoop around the fields to check that no one is doing their business out in the open.

 Just one mistake by one individual and the whole village forfeits thecash prize.