UMA SHANKER SINGH IFS, PhD
Five years ago, when Indian Prime Minister launched the ambitious
Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign, he had announced October 2, 2019, as the
day country will be free of open defecation free (ODF)
He said on 2.10.2019 in
Ahmadabad that In 60 months, 600 million people have been given access to
toilets, more than 110 million toilets have been built.
The whole world is amazed to hear this. In the month of September 2019,
two Dalit (former untouchables) children - Roshni Valmiki, 12, and her
10-year-old nephew, Avinash were beaten to death in a village in central
India's Madhya Pradesh state for defecating in the open. Avinash's father Manoj
Valmiki told Al Jazeera they lived in a small hut without a toilet.
Ironically, their village was declared ODF by the government in April
last year. Open defecation refers to the practice whereby people defecate in
fields, bushes, forests, open bodies of water or other open spaces rather than
using a toilet.
More than 300 million Indians are still defecating in the open in 2018,
according to the World Bank. Experts said that while the construction of
toilets has increased, lack of water, poor maintenance stood in the way of
ending the practice.
STUDY
REPORT-2018
The Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) surveyed
3,235 households in four north Indian states in 2014 and 2018. Their research,
released in January 2019 this year, found that open defecation had reduced by
26 percent since Clean India was launched and access to household toilets
increased from 37 percent in 2014 to 71 percent in 2018.
However, the study found that 23 percent of people who owned a toilet
continued to defecate in the open, including in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh
states, which have been declared ODF.
This government is working only to create headlines. The government
should provide the facility to every household and we support the government in
that. But to claim that everybody has got a toilet and nobody is going in the
open is completely a bogus statement.
Now the question remains to be answered whether rural India is really
open defecation-free? The Swachh Bharat Mission website claims with some
caveats that the country has achieved 100% coverage of latrine ownership.
If this was the definition of being open defecation-free, then, again
with some caveats, India can be declared so.
STUDY
FINDINGS OF NAZAR KHALID AND NIKHIL SRIVASTAV FINDS THAT ON AN AVERAGE 38
TOILETS WERE CONSTRUCTED IN A MINUTE
Ten months ago, a survey was
conducted by a team and they revisited the families who were interviewed in a
2014 survey in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and MP and it found that between
2014 and the end of 2018, latrine ownership in the region had increased by 34
percentage points.
Yet, even in States that had already been declared open
defecation-free, the actual coverage was far below 100%. Although the percentage
of people defecating in the open declined by 26 percentage points, close to
half still reported to be relieving themselves in the open.
And sadly, the programme barely managed to bring any change in the
behavior of latrine owners. Like in 2014, about a quarter of people who own a
functional latrine continued to defecate in the open. Overall, the study found
that 44% of people in these four States defecated in the open.
These facts are unlikely to have radically changed in only 10 months.
We have many questions but the most important remains to be answered that why
don’t we have a sanitation policy that will address the remaining who openly
defecate?
For those who care about India’s abandoned toilets and stunted health
outcomes, this is an important question. In the past five years, the Indian
government has built 100 million toilets. This implies that it constructed 38
toilets every minute that had passed since the Swachh Bharat Mission was
launched. With a country as large as India, this is a big achievement. But
another important question to ask here is: how was this achieved?
CSE
REPORT 2018 FINDS A SEA OF EXCRETA TO BE HEALTH HAZARD
In this case we find that building toilets is only the first and
perhaps the easiest but step towards attaining a ‘clean India’ status. It
cannot be seen as the ultimate yardstick of success. What happens to the
immense amounts of solid and liquid waste that these millions of new toilets
would generate? If human excreta are not handled carefully safely disposed of
or reused it will add to our health burden and negate all the work done to
build the toilets.
Let us see how monumental the problem would be: 1, 00,000 tonne of
excreta every day produced by 720 million people using 144 million household
toilets just to give a sense of scale, more than 5,200 trucks would be needed
every day to transport this amount of excreta!
CSE has based this estimate on the standard calculation that on an
average, an individual produces 128 gram of excreta every day. This could turn
out to be a far bigger problem than that of open defecation. If not managed
properly, the mind-boggling amounts of waste that these toilets will spew forth
close to people’s homes can severely contaminate the land and water sources.
What compounds the problem is the manner in which the entire process of
making villages ODF has been carried out. To declare India’s 0.6 million
villages ODF, the Census 2011 involved 2.7 million officials, ostensibly
working in collaboration with 3.6 million village residents. However, the rush
to achieve targets has led to false claims. The analysis quotes the reports of
the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Gujarat and Uttarakhand, which
have exposed cases of fudging of data. Poorly designed and built, many of these
toilets have added to the burden.
For instance, in those built in flood-prone areas, the stored faeces
pose a major pollution and health hazard during monsoons. The high density of
pit latrines and poorly made and maintained septic tanks can render the shallow
aquifer water unfit for drinking because of nitrate and bacterial
contamination.
