Congratulations! India Is Open Defecation Free

On Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 th birthday, India becomes open defecation free. While it is an occasion to celebrate the achievement of creating millions of toilets in record time, it is also a time to plan for ensuring that the gains made are not lost and the pollution remains checked. Down To Earth reporters travel to 13 districts in six states to gauge if India can sustain its open defecation-free status, while Sushmita Sengupta and Snigdha Das analyse the challenges ahead

- Sushmita Sengupta And Snigdha Das

A sense of jubilation fills the air in Uttar Pradesh’s Benda village as the Union government prepares to declare the country open defecation free (ODF) on October 2, Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary. This is the date Prime Minister Narendra Modi had envisioned India to attain Sampoorna Swachhata (total sanitation) under his flagship Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM).

Benda is located in the drought-prone poverty-stricken region of Bundelkhand. Yet by 2018, much before Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath could bag the ODF tag for the state, Benda had managed to declare itself ODF. Bright colored motifs and slogans now adorn the walls of toilets, the only concrete structure neatly scattered across the village. “The decorations are part of the competitions we organize from time to time so that people keep their toilets clean and use them,” says 75-year-old Matgayan Singh. He is a Swachhagrahi, our foot soldier of the mission, whose responsibility is to leverage his social ties in the village to reinforce the message of sanitation. “The task was not easy initially when SBM was launched (in October 2014). But gradually people understood the security linked with toilets,” he says. The region is infamous for attacks and assaults on women, particularly when they step out early in the morning or late in the evening to relieve themselves.