“The world is amazed that toilets have been provided to more than 600 million people in 60 months, building more than 110 million toilets,” Modi said on Wednesday, the 150th anniversary of Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. “No one was ready to believe earlier that India will become open defecation-free in such a short period of time. Now, it is a reality.”
Nazar Khalid, research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE), said the government focused too much on building toilets and failed to make sure people actually used them. The government also didn’t ensure the new toilets were properly maintained, he added, with sewage properly disposed of.
The problem
Is India really open defecation free?
However experts say the figures are overblown, and that many people are still living without access to a toilet — or don’t use one even if they can.
“We need to appreciate that this government has made sanitation a big priority, which has not happened in the past,” said RICE’s Khalid. “But this is such a big farce because open defecation by no means has been eliminated.”
One problem, according to Khalid, was that the government focused on getting the villages to build toilets, but it didn’t consider facility maintenance and sewage management.
“You are supposed to not only construct latrines but also educate people on how to use them, how to maintain them and what happens with the sludge that goes inside the pit,” Khalid said.
A. Kalimuthu, project director at the WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) Institute, said: “The construction is the easy part.
“We build hundreds of toilets, but the major focus is teaching people that the toilet is not a hardware, it’s a software.”
Caste issues also remain a significant barrier to changing those attitudes. Traditionally it is the lowest caste members whose job it is to clean latrines and sewers — and they are considered “untouchable” by higher castes.
“People don’t want to handle human feces which has traditionally been reserved for a certain category of people in our society — manual scavengers,” Khalid said.
Ultimately, Khalid said, open defecation “is a behavioral issue, not about access” — and focus should move to finding out whether Modi’s campaign has produced real health impacts.
“It seems very unlikely that a lot of health benefits would be achieved by being partially open defecation free,” he said.
Source : Nbcnewyork