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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Dirty Truth about Sanitation -TR Raghunandan

The Dirty Truth about Sanitation -TR Raghunandan

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published Published on Oct 5, 2014   modified Modified on Oct 5, 2014
-Accountability Initiative/ RaghuBytes

Unless you have a blocked nose, I strongly suggest that you do not drive from Bhubaneshwar the capital of Orissa, to Kandamahal, a remote tribal district, particularly in the evenings. At twilight, when you begin to wind into the interior, you are greeted with the sight of the behinds of the entire population squatting on the roadside, faces turned away and shitting. We quickly wound up the windows and switched on the air-conditioning, but nothing could stop the stench of human excrement.

Why is it like this, I asked the earnest officer from the Orissa Rural Development Department, who was accompanying me. He reeled off statistics - of toilets being built, of physical and financial progress, of subsidy bills not being cleared by the Delhi Ministry and such like. ‘Don't give me c**p', I said, ‘Why don't people use these toilets you have built?' And in any case, why do they come to the road side?'

‘Well, people believe it is unhygienic to relieve themselves at home', he said, ‘because God lives in the home. And they do not relieve themselves in the fields too, because God lives there too'. Quite clearly, government constructed roads had reached the appropriate level of Godlessness, to be considered safe to accept vast quantities of human excreta.

Yet, if you believe what goes on in government meetings, the main reason why people don't use toilets is because they cannot afford to construct them; the construction subsidies are inadequate. This is what MLAs and Panchayat members, many who are part-time construction contractors, will tell you. Of course, they have no answer when you point out that toilets built practically free still remain unused, though they are pretty useful as firewood storage sheds.

The blunt fact is that India is toilet-in-a-room resistant. This is part of a greater affliction, of our generally being ignorant, or resistant to sanitation related community habits. Littering, for example, is something where class and caste is no bar; any public street in urban India offers ample evidence. And of course, our public institutions carry the dirtiness mantle very well. India's railways efficiently spray our bodily fluids, solids and semisolids over thousands of kilometers of track, not to speak of non-biodegradable wrappings for meals, and other waste material.

The launch by the Prime Minister yesterday of the Swachcha Bharat Abhiyan (the clean India campaign) is a welcome renewal of India's efforts to clean itself. Sanitation campaigns have been around for a long time; the previous edition, named the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was launched in 1999, provided a generous subsidy of Rs. 10000 for each toilet and ran a reasonably successful annual prize competition - the Nirmal Gram Puraskar - which awarded Panchayats for achieving 100 percent open air defecation free villages;. However, India does not seem to have got visibly cleaner, and there lies lessons that the current campaign could well learn from.

First, a clean India campaign cannot be fragmented; it must have the same intensity of purpose in villages, towns and municipalities. The penchant for running everything as government programmes supervised by separate Ministries in Delhi has led to cleanliness efforts in villages and towns being run in silos. This lack of coordination has left common problems unsolved; for instance, there is no coordinated approach to land-fills, which has caused the problem of where to dispose of vast quantities of urban waste to fester and finally explode, with rural and urban local governments grimly engaged in standoffs.

Second, urban India has lagged behind in terms of cleanliness interventions. This has led to the paradox of clean villages in States where the sanitation message has gone home (such as in Kerala), contrasting with dirty cities in these very States, where municipalities have not gained the management skills to keep themselves clean.

Third, the focus on reducing open air defecation, while very important, has distracted governments from dealing with other sanitation related problems with equal intensity. Plastic waste is rampant in both urban and rural areas and littering of un-segregated garbage in urban areas a major, unsolved problem. Our efforts at sewage treatment are grossly inadequate.

What is it that the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan could do better than its predecessors? Here are four suggestions that might be of use.

First, stay away from spending too much time discussing subsidization. This is important, but not critical in achieving success, if other interventions are not pursued as well.

Second, we need to stay the course on getting people to change their sanitation related beliefs and behaviour. Here, the rural strategy will need to be different from the urban one; in the latter, the focus will need to be greater on cracking down on littering and emphasizing segregation and recycling. However, pumping in more money into information campaigns without a thought to their outcomes is avoidable. Analysis of successful examples where cleanliness has been achieved and maintained might throw up good ideas on what kind of communication strategy is likely to work.

Third, we need to invest heavily in urban areas, more in terms of management skills and policy interventions, rather than in money. Urban areas have the capability of generating enough resources to tackle garbage, but management abilities are limited, starting with training, safety and use of ergonomic, labour saving devices by sanitation workers, managing the logistics of garbage clearance, and scientific management of treatment facilities including landfills. And of course, there is the huge problem of pumping untreated or partly treated waste into rivers and water bodies - that will require much more money than what we are spending at the moment.

Last, nothing can be achieved without peoples' participation. The success and failures of the Nirmal Gram Puraskar amply show that cleanliness has sustained where there was a genuine effort to involve people and invoke their sense of dignity and pride in their villages. The Puraskar got a bad name where State governments began to artificially set targets for achievement, villages were cosmetically dressed up for the evaluation day, and they went back to their old ways once the prize was received.


Accountability Initiative/ RaghuBytes, 4 October, 2014, http://www.accountabilityindia.in/raghubytes/dirty-truth-about-sanitation


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