Construct toilets that nobody wants to use. And make everybody happy!

How some things do not change. Way back in 1986, the Government of India launched the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP). In 1999 it was relaunched as the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC). The aim of both the schemes was providing better sanitation throughout the country. Both the programmes failed so miserably that hardly anyone remember these schemes. The previous government after tinkering extensively with the TSC, launched a more ambitious scheme christened Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) in 2012 by launching a mass awareness campaign on sanitation and construction of toilets through enhanced budgetary allocations. The government claimed that under the NBA, one crore toilets were built in two years. NBA too did not quite succeed in achieving its aim. It was meant to be demand-driven i.e. toilets were only to be built if people ask for them. However, the ground reality was that toilets were being built by the local pradhan or district administration without consulting villagers on the location, design or operation of the toilet, and without educating them about the health risks of open defecation. The result was that most of the toilets either remained unused or were used as store rooms for grain etc. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) Mission launched last year by this government is nothing but a scaled up version of NBA. Its aim is to build 11 crore toilets in five years, at the rate of one toilet every second. And by all accounts this scheme is heading for failure too. The reasons why the schemes failed are many.

Our politicians come up with such lofty schemes because they represent the people in their constituency to whom they are answerable. However, the actual contours of the scheme and the nitty-gritty of the schemes' financing and implementation is left to the bureaucrats who, ensconced in their air-conditioned rooms, are past masters in making a mess of any good intentioned scheme. This insensitive know-all bureaucracy, having proper, private, comfortable, well ventilated and smell free toilets for itself, arbitrarily decided that what the rural/urban poor need is purely functional latrines devoid of any aesthetics. And they came up with latrines typically consisting of a pit (that must be emptied manually, regularly), with a ceramic squat-toilet on top, enclosed by a claustrophobic cement or brick cubicle with a narrow door, with little access to running water. "Most toilets are unusable because they have serious technical errors. The angle of pan is not steep enough, or the pipe that connects the pan to the pit is not sloped properly, or the pit collapses on its own weight." note @WaterAid/Poulumi Basu. The shoddily designed latrines, be it of Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) or the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) or Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) or Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), have the trademark stamp of government bad taste; insincerity; lack of empathy and; sheer lethargy. Luis Miranda, Advisor, Samhita calls these latrines "pokey, smelly and filthy cells that masquerade as toilets." The self serving bureaucracy including the 'sarkari' scientists/technocrats just cannot be expected to understand that in order to move from open defecation to a latrine, people, be they poor or affluent, require much higher toilet standards. No wonder that a study found that 53% of people who own a government latrine do not use it at all.

The other major put-off for majority of people is the 'pit' of the latrine that requires emptying manually and regularly. Sanitation, Quality, Use and Trends (SQUAT) study by Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) found that it was simply not acceptable to many Indians to have human waste polluting their compounds or to deal with manually removing the waste. In our country's embedded caste system, the (so- called) ‘‘untouchables’’were forced to clean human waste. But now the so-called untouchables justifiably resent and avoid doing this type of work because it is associated with their oppression under the degrading caste system. And the sad fact is that since majority of Indians associate manual scavenging with the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy, the prospect of the so-called upper caste households (whether poor or affluent) condescending to manually empty the pit is extremely remote. "Anybody who is of (so-called) higher caste fears a situation when their pit fills up and there is nobody willing to clean it because of the social stigma. That fear discourages sustained use of toilets.",said Sangita Vyas, Managing Director, RICE. "How can you speak about toilets for everyone without first freeing certain caste groups from the degrading work of cleaning human waste?" observes Bezwada Wilson, Founder, Sanitation Workers Movement. "For any sanitation programme to be successful in India, the government has to first mechanise the entire cleaning activities of the pit latrines, sewer lines and septic tanks."

It is ironic that the people for whom the toilets are being built are the one least happy. The only happy people are the implementing bureaucracy and the contractors and suppliers. They are having a field day! It is corruption time folks! The government has set up ambitious targets for construction of toilets. The contractors and the 'babus' at local level know that there is money (lots of it) to be made in a construction-centred sanitation programme.They also know that the 'sahebs' are not going to leave their air-conditioned chambers to walk around dusty and filthy villages checking/auditing the implementation and the quality of the structures because the scheme is meant for "them" - the others -the rural poor. It is common knowledge that in target driven and/or time bound construction projects of government, all i.e contractors, babus, engineers,civic authorities/employees, panchayat officials and even the beneficiaries make money through supply and use of spurious hardware and construction material. Some of the testimonies to such corruption are Indira Awas Yojana, Anganwadi project, Commonwealth Games construction and beautification projects etc. In the case of toilet construction programme, it is easier to make money because majority of the beneficiaries are not enthusiastic about having this shoddy structure in their compound, and therefore would be more than willing to cut a deal and share the booty. But, mind you, budgetary allocation will be utilised; implementation report submitted; there will be photo-ops of smiling politicians with villagers (with colourfully painted and flower bedecked toilet structures as backdrops!).

#swachbharatmission #sanitation #sanitationscheme #toiletsforall