India and sanitation: Achieving the impossible?
In 2014 a campaign was launched in India called the Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission), which lists its mission statement as seeking to make the country free of “open defecation” – the practice of defecating outside – by 2019.
On the face of it that might seem like a fairly basic and achievable aim. After all, we in the West have, largely, had sanitation and sewage control since the mid to late 19th century. That’s not to comment on its current state as Victorian tunnels that were never designed to cope with the current demand constantly get filled with repugnant ‘fatbergs’ – a horrid collection of fat and oil which coagulates around things like tampons and nappies.
In the 1990’s the Supreme Court of India recognised basic sanitation as a fundamental human right, despite being responsible for up to 60% of the world’s open defecation just 5 years ago. Since then successive Indian governments have been trying to get a grip of the problem, and that issue has only been highlighted by the start of the 2014 national campaign and, much more recently, the recognition by the UN that sanitation is a fundamental human right.
The scale of the challenge is stark, according to Swachh Bharat’s own figures, their target for 2019 is to have over 10,000,000 household toilets, but have so far only achieved 6,642,221 leaving nearly 3 and a half million toilets plumbed and connected to a sewage network within under 3 years.
The biggest challenge presented is the country’s rural areas where a large section of the population lives. In these areas a huge amount of people coupled with the cost of building brand new plumbing networks from scratch are proving difficult to overcome.
According to an article written on the subject by Phillipe Cullet of The University of London, roughly half of the rural population are estimated to lack proper access to sanitation. In rural areas, people often go to remote fields to relieve themselves – separate for men and women.
Cullet goes on to say that one of the most important challenges will be to build community and public toilets. In a number of places, community toilets are necessary because building individual toilets at home may not be feasible, for instance, because of lack of space. Also, they are necessary for people without a house, such as homeless people and migrant workers.
The need for community toilets is already recognised as part of current sanitation interventions but is often not implemented. And local authorities often lack the funds to pay someone to undertake the cleaning of the facilities once built.
India has a real issue with attitudes to sanitation with ideas surrounding the caste system (a form of class system which has endured from colonial rule) and gender presenting real issues. A lot of the drive from certain areas of the population come from men who feel that private toilet facilities are required in order to preserve the modesty of women but, Cullet argues, this places the burden of change solely onto women, and requires a change in attitude.
Further challenges presented by the caste system is that a newer, larger network will require lots of workers in order to maintain it and many consider this work to be beneath their class. Only the bottom classes, it is considered, should need to work cleaning human excrement.
The challenges for India are huge but their commitment to raising the living standards of their population are commendable and the UN has recognised their efforts. Hopefully by 2019 India can achieve its goal of a toilet in every household and public toilets in every area.
