A rural India is still awaiting to go beyond shame & stigma

by S.G.

India has come a long way since the days of its rigid top-down Central Rural Sanitation Programme, which had minimal community participation. First it was the Total Sanitation Campaign, which then became the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan and, most recently, the Swachh Bharat Mission.
While the language, signature and branding has differed over time, the basic idea remains the same – improving sanitation and ridding the country of open defecation.

India needs to answer the important question of whether rural India can and will embrace toilet culture, and that must drive its colossal plan to rid the country of open defecation.

Two words: Swachh Bharat. They rarely takes listeners by surprise any more. While there is no denying that the concept of a swachh Bharat (clean India) has been drummed into the country’s collective psyche over the last year or so, how to go about achieving it eludes many practitioners and policy-makers alike. With the intent to iron out confusion relating to its implementation in India’s rural pockets, SM Sehgal Foundation’s Sushasan Abhi team zeroed in on preparing communities and panchayats towards achieving a swachh gaon (clean village), and this became the theme of their annual Good Rural Governance Conference.

Toilet coverage in every household is still a long way off. (Photos: SG.)

Achieving an open-defecation-free India is easier said than done. Challenging hardened notions and trying to change a person’s most private behaviour requires thoughtful planning and devoted action. Constructing toilets for those who can’t afford it might make sense but of what use is a room with a hole to a society which shuns latrines or keeps them unused, thanks to a host of social and cultural impediments? Can the stigma ever be broken? 

Census 2011 indicates that nearly 70 per cent of all Indians live away from cities. While the Government has chalked out several development strategies for rural India such as the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana and the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, the Foundation’s CEO Jane Schukoske believes that it is very difficult to achieve other development targets if sanitation is left lacking. She seems quite certain that there can be no adarsh (ideal) without swachh.

Government and non-government organisations have adopted a number of strategies from cajolery to coercion, and from rewarding to shaming to get people to construct and use toilets. But, they have not always yielded the desired results. States like Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Bihar still struggle with low toilet density – almost one in 14 households does not have an individual latrine.

Satyapal who works with a community-based organisation called Sahyog in Haryana’s Rohtak district, says that though personal hygiene may have improved over the years, community hygiene as a whole has considerably deteriorated. The most recent edition of the Swachhta Status Report brought out by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) backs the claim. Though the construction of individual household latrines has shown a sharp increase of close to 70 per cent compared to 2014-15 figures, only 13 per cent of villages have community toilets.

The major hitch in keeping these latrines clean calls for modifying apathetic attitudes when it comes to caring for community assets. People must constantly be reminded that they need to maintain their sanitary assets for their health and hygiene’s sake, and not because the Government asks them to.

Decades’ worth of work in creating awareness on the importance of good personal and communal hygiene, however, is not completely in vain. The presence of toilets has been found to influence social status apart from economic development, both at the micro and macro levels. Behaviour-change strategies should make sure that they put everything in perspective and address them both. Speaking from experience, Chandra Shekar Gowda from Swades Foundation asserts that when evidence on implication of communities’ situation is presented, it evokes action.

Take for example the sanitation-health-economics connect; it is easier for people to get their heads around using latrines when they are made to understand the inverse proportionality between improved sanitation and decreased instances of diarrhoea. And the fact that informal leaders hold more sway than the elected ones, Swades Foundation has been successful in getting the message across through select individuals that the larger community holds in high regard.

While the organisation’s support is available to the community initially, external support cannot and should not be around all the time. For any programme to succeed, it is imperative that the communities take over the responsibility. Swades has been successful in getting the community together and establishing ‘Empowered Village Development Committees’, made responsible for planning, executing and monitoring projects implemented within their jurisdictions. Trained community members ensure that operation and maintenance is taken care of with little or no external assistance.

Newspaper reports are replete with instances of villagers turning vigilante; of groups of whistle-wielding women shooing away villagers squatting to relieve themselves at the break of dawn. But is it right to just focus singularly on the idea of shame, or is there something bigger which could act as a more potent driver of behaviour change? “It is important that we look beyond just shame and probe the phenomenon of human dignity as a whole”, suggests Professor Avinash Kumar from the Management Development Institute, Gurugram. “Stunted notions on sanitation is not a peculiar feature of rural India, it is more universal than we think it is. Take any house; the toilet is the smallest and also the dirtiest. There is an urgent need to attach positive symbolism and de-stigmatise the toilet”, he adds.

Kumar feels that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is on the right track. An excellent exercise in social engineering, the Abhiyan started off by de-stigmatising the ‘lowly’ broom and all the negativity associated with it. Not satisfied with just being an awareness-creation exercise, the programme metamorphosed into one that encouraged citizen engagement and promoted collective action. Citizens’ duties and responsibilities were no longer veiled from the public eye and toilets were widely advertised as agents of good sanitation – (Courtesy: www.india waterportal.org)

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