Loo And Behold, But Beware

The countdown to meet the target of an open defecation free India has begun. Though it seemed like we were once again going to miss another development goal, we will achieve the target within the next 25 weeks, much before the deadline of October 2019. India's first-ever experience when all of us will have a toilet of our own is worth a grand applause. However, we have just crossed the first hurdlethe easiest milestone of constructing toilets. SUSMITA SENGUPTA and RASHMI VERMA take a hard look at the challenges that need to be addressed

WITH THE advantage of hindsight, one could argue: this is a civilisational leap forward. In about 25 weeks, India would shed one of its stickiest stigmas. By February 2019, the country would be open defecation free (ODF ). It means the infamous distinction of having the world’s largest number of people going out for defecation would be history. The switchover— generations old behaviour of some 600 million people—is no mean feat.

It was in 1986 that the Indian government launched the Central Rural Sanitation Programme—the first nationwide sanitation programme. The programme had no target year and in vague terms spoke about improving the quality of life. Several other sanitation programmes were launched in the next 28 years, like the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in rural India and Basic Services for Urban Poor in urban India. But India’s hope to be ODF remained as bruised as its millions of toilets that were built but never used.

A couple of months before Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM ) in October 2014, the state of sanitation was still abysmal. At the time when Modi delivered his maiden Independence Day speech in 2014 less than 50 per cent of households in the country had access to sanitation facilities and only 30 per cent of the wastewater and sewage generated in urban India was treated before being let into rivers and streams. Every year, an estimated 0.4 million children died of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and suffered from stunted growth. So, Modi’s promise of making the country ODF by October 2, 2019—the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi—through another programme seemed just another expression of political will that would ultimately meet the fate of earlier programmes.