What happened to the budgets and funding for sanitation in the past twenty years?

What happened to the budgets and funding for sanitation in the past twenty years?

In a country where a fraction of us go ahead and prepare for the TOEFL and IELTS exams, there are millions who will fail a simple vocabulary test. Ask them the meaning of these terms that the privileged few of us know and understand and you’ll know at least one of the most sordid truths of modern India: cistern, ballcock, commode, flush, bidet, pot, trip lever, vitreous, and toilet lid. The truth is that to know a word you need to have first seen and/or experienced what the word means. And the toilet terminology doesn’t deal with the abstractions of theology, so please do not tell me that you know how to spell GOD even though you haven’t seen Him.

Look around and you will find that this analogy isn’t off the mark. My father didn’t mind spending his entire life without bothering to know what an MI stood for, but once he had a cardiac attack, he was able to prattle like a cardiologist in a matter of weeks! I’m not asking anyone to remain ignorant because I know a lot of words about things that I am not directly connected to… all I am saying is that exposure makes knowledge come easily (pun intended).

India has nearly 48% of urban population with no access to toilets and this goes up to 60% for rural areas. A report in the First Post points out that “more than half of 1.2 billion people in India live without toilets… despite the Indian government spending close to Rs1,250 billion on water and sanitation projects in the last 20 years.” This report also goes on to say that “survey figures, collected so far, mention that 54.7 percent households in the country are without toilets. The number is likely to go up sharply, considering that data is still being collected. So far, only a fraction of the total 252,824 gram panchayats in the country has been covered under the survey.” The situation, I must insist, is grave and so it doesn’t surprise me to see Narendra Modi talking of improving the toilet penetration… and this is particularly for the girl child as well. According to the government, the aim is to build 20 million toilets by 2015.

Yes, we suffer from a scarcity of toilets in our country. The US probably has more words written on UFO sightings than our schools have toilets for the girl child! This may sound statistically challenged but if you’ve read it, I have made my point.

I recollect becoming aware of the acute shortage of toilets when I was a kid of no more than 4 or 5. When I was a small kid and travelled by train from Jhansi, my home-town to Delhi that I loved visiting, I remember being utterly perplexed by the hundreds of little boards with TOLET written on them. Well, even if the space between ‘to’ and ‘let’ was there, I did not possibly pay much attention to it because I once asked my father, ‘There are hundreds of toilets in every village and city that we pass through and yet I see hundreds of people defecating by the railway line? I don’t understand this at all.’ My father asked me to repeat my question, then smiled and explained to me that when you add an ‘I’ to to-let, it becomes a toilet. I kept quiet and in my mind concluded that people who lived in their houses or in rented houses had access to toilets and the rest of the world came and sat by the tracks. This disturbed me to no end because the tracks always seemed to be abuzz with people.

If you ask me, the government insisting that the entire nation come together to help build an adequate number of toilets is a scheme that comes with more advantages than one can ordinarily think of. Obviously, defecating in the open is hazardous to health… but equally vital is the boost that this will give to the generation of employment in the rural sector. Schools having functional toilets for girls will obviously increase not just their safety and security but might give the right push to increase literacy as well.

Before writing this post, I was discussing the issue with Specky, my wife, and she asked, ‘I think there have been subsidies and a lot of funds ear-marked for toilet construction in the past years too.’ So what happened to that entire budget and all that effort? No, we did not have any answer to this pithy query because we have seen how the actual beneficiary never seems to be getting the advantage in most of these schemes. There is, of course, a need for private players to step in and individuals too need to contribute in whichever way they can. So, for instance, if DOMEX says that they will through their ‘Domex Toilet Academy’ have a ‘a sustainable and long-term solution to provide sanitation that benefits the local community and helps stimulate the local economy’ then even bloggers, journalists, and writers help them communicate this message to a wider audience. Domex, by the way, is HUL’s flagship sanitation brand, and currently runs the Domex Toilet Academy (DTA) programme, launched on the 19th of November 2013. Their aim is to make ‘toilets accessible and affordable, while promoting the benefits of clean toilets & good hygiene.’ They go on to claim that their effort ‘has resulted in bringing the change in the villages of Maharashtra and Orissa and (we) aim to build 24000 toilets by 2015 in rural areas faced with the problem of open defecation.’

As a reader of this post, even you can reach out to the ‘You click – Domex contributes’ page and help their initiative. Each click on the ‘contribute’ tab will mean a Domex contribution of Rs.5 on your behalf to eradicate open defecation.

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The Domex initiative

The Domex initiative

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Post written to support the Domex and indiblogger initiative

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Arvind Passey
17 November 2014