India was declared Open Defecation Free on October 2, 2019, on the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, as had been envisaged at the time of the scheme’s launch in 2014. But excrement continued to happen, that is, in the open. So, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) continued to build toilets in rural areas, and a second edition of SBM (urban) was launched.
More than 12 crore Individual Household Toilets (IHHTs), in the jargon, have been built under the SBM, 11.5 crore of them in rural areas. Considering that India only has some 32 crore households, the numbers make it clear that 37.5 percent of households have toilets because of the Mission. This is quite an achievement, from the point of view of implementation of a government scheme.
Yet, the National Family Health Survey 2019-21 showed that 19 percent of the population do not have access to a toilet. At least a fifth of the population still relieve themselves in the open. Of those who have access to a toilet, what proportion chooses not to use them is not known. Sporadic reports in the media indicate that quite a few use their government-built toilets for purposes other than the one for which they have been provided. Storage is a common use. Some use it for cooking.
Factors that hold back coverage
Why this reluctance to use toilets as toilets? A scheme to bring piped water to homes is still being rolled out. In situations where people have to fetch water from a distance, carrying it in pots and pails, reluctance to flush the stuff down the toilet is perfectly understandable. If you do not want to use water to flush the toilet, you cannot use the toilet.
Even when water is available, there is another hitch. Most latrines built under the SBM are of the two-pit model. The material from the toilet drains first into one pit, and when that is full, into the second one. The water leeches away through the walls of the pit, leaving the remainder to decompose into what scientific folk not overly troubled by cultural taboos declare to be manure fit for agriculture. Once the pit fills up, it has to be emptied, and thus readied for another cycle of use.
Toilets not connected to either a sewer network or a proper septic tank thus call for compulsory negotiation of the purity/pollution question right at home every couple of years. The traditional method, of responding to nature’s call right on nature’s breast itself, dispenses with such queasy compulsions.
The continued reluctance of nearly a fifth of the population to use a toilet partly illuminates the reason why official attempts to end the practice of open defecation have not succeeded.
The first centralized effort in this direction was started as early as in 1986, in the form of the Central Rural Sanitation Programme. It lost its way somewhere down the line.
Next came the Total Sanitation Programme of 1999. It, too, floundered, but its soul survived, to transmigrate into the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan of 2012. That aimed to rid India of open defecation by 2022, that is, within a decade.
Changes brought about by Modi
When Narendra Modi took office in 2014, he rebranded the scheme as Swachh Bharat Mission, advanced the end date to 2019, linking it to Gandhi. This had two effects. One, the sanitation programme got elevated from the level of pits, drains, and cesspools to a higher, nationalist plane. Two, Gandhi, who singlehandedly willed warring communal factions in Noakhali into peace and laid down his life in the cause of amity between Hindus and Muslims, got detached from the context of sectarian strife and now figures in the contemporary narrative as a symbol of sanitation and cleanliness.
Modi is the first prime minister to have raised the issue of sanitation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. His high-profile commitment to the scheme mobilized budgetary and extra-budgetary resources to toilet building. Corporate Social Responsibility woke up to the challenge. And outdid itself – building school toilets in glossy brochures that pesky news reporters could not find on the ground. Yet, indisputably, the SBM brought new focus, energy and resources to a cause that has the potential to improve health outcomes in India.
How SBM helps tackle nutrition challenge
There are serious disagreements about the levels of malnourishment, stunting and wasting that afflict children in India. But there is little dispute that getting rid of enteric parasites would improve nutrition levels with the same availability of food. And successful implementation of the SBM would reduce the spread of enteric parasites.
Empowerment can be a force multiplier for SBM
Adoption of plumbing, toilets and sanitation is a recent achievement in human history, associated with economic and social progress. Attempts to create ‘development’ by serving up disparate elements of it to people who still remain bereft of the elementary human agency that comes with political empowerment and would enable them to appropriate and meld these components of development together are bound to fail.
When people of certain social groups can be attacked for conduct deemed to be above their social station – riding a horse for their wedding, growing a moustache or wearing a garment that extends below the knee – or doing business in localities that the existing power elite decides should exclude them, this creates disempowerment that erodes the cultural roots of social progress.
Political empowerment of the bottom of the pyramid, and not just political commitment to a project, is vital for the project to permeate the lives of the target beneficiaries, and change the quality of collective life for everyone. With that empowerment, SBM would be a bigger success.
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