FOR WANT OF A TOILET: A continued lack of appropriate sanitation in India has serious health consequences.
Image: Flickr / Sustainable Sanitation
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BETTIAH, INDIA—A jeep traveling through this small town in rural Bihar State affords the usual sights: the traffic chaos of donkey carts, cycle-rickshaw wallahs, motorbikes carrying six-person families, wandering cattle and pigs—all contributing to the cacophony of urban Indian life. As the town chaos thins out, there are other sights such as: haystacks, sugar cane fields and bright pink saris. And then, along the roadside, one pile of brown material after the other, in a shameful line. This is where the people of this part of town come every morning to defecate—either because they have no toilet or they prefer to squat on their haunches in the open.
That preference is the bane of anyone attempting to solve the world's woeful sanitation situation. Over two billion people still lack toilets, and while low-cost toilet solutions are available, many people here in India still choose to do their business outdoors due to cultural inertia. Yet, a single gram of feces can carry 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. These hazards can be carried back on feet and fingers into food and water. Uncovered waste kills more children annually than HIV/AIDS, TB and measles combined. In India, 626 million people persist in defecating in fields, on roadsides or anywhere but in a toilet, although their children die of diarrhea and their wives and daughters must wake up at 4:30 AM to have the modesty of darkness, risking rape, snakebites and—no small matter in these parts—ghosts.
I am in Bihar with the Great Wash Yatra, a carnival of sanitation and hygiene organized by the German non-governmental organization WASH United and the Indian design agency Quicksand. The Yatra—"journey" in Hindi—has traveled 2,000 kilometers through rural India in 51 days, stopping in six towns and villages to spread its messages: stop defecating in the open, wash your hands with soap before eating and break the silence around menstrual hygiene. (In these areas girls are never told what to expect before they first menstruate. As a consequence, they often think they are injured or diseased, or believe in local folk superstitions such as that a menstruating girl's touch makes pickles go rotten.)
The Great Wash Yatra spreads these messages using the oldest social engineering trick around: Make the lesson fun. Leaders organize interactive games such as Poo Minefield, where a blindfolded contestant must avoid the piles of excreta and pick up soap bars. People bowl out the diarrhea demon; or pitch poo-balls at giant germs. The organizers stage songs and Bollywood dances with sanitation and hand-washing themes and a "WASH Idol" contest. Celebrity endorsements from superstar cricketers and Bollywood actresses add glamour. The queues are always huge; the kids always love it; and the messages, it is hoped, will enter via this lateral route of fun and Bollywood stardust and so stick.
The Great Wash Yatra is not the first attempt to promote toilet use in the 65 years since Indian independence. Millions of dollars have been spent on toilet-building government schemes. Millions of those toilets have been turned into storehouses that their owners pass while strolling to their chosen defecation ground. Dozens of United Nations agencies, NGOs and corporations have spread health and hygiene messages, dispensed soap and scratched their heads at why so many million Indians can still be found day in day out using roadsides and fields as a toilet.
A dozen kilometers from the Yatra site in Bettiah is the village of Lokhara, home to about 250 households. It is beautiful and quiet, a blessed relief after the cacophony of even small-town India. More strikingly, it is clean. There is no trash, as there is spread over 100 square meters of open ground outside the Yatra site, and on every roadside. Lokhara’s houses are simple mud structures, mostly, with the odd brick construction. Subsistence farming is the norm; the daily wage if a wage can be found is 150 rupees (about $2.75). Yet nearly every poor mud house now has a simple, wonderful structure alongside the storehouses: a new, self-made toilet that costs peanuts and saves lives. And they were built not by the government nor NGOs but by the intangible art of psychological manipulation.
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16 Comments
Add CommentThere was a design of decent out houses available for many years it had screen covered vents and lids to prevent flies. It worked very well for many many years required no utility's and protected one from weather. When the pit filled a new pit was dug and the slab with the out house was dragged over the new pit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find it interesting that what I had thought obvious was that a civilization would quickly evolve to burying the feces. Seems so obvious, but most other animals don't. I guess the human animal didn't evolve the behavior over time either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLarryW...Interesting point. I wonder if there was a time in the past where they were buried to hide your location from a predator. Maybe in the last +50k years after we became the predator, we lost the motivation/need...Just a thought...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn further thought, probably not. If I remember right, chimps actually throw it at enemies.
Deut. 23:14 Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Diesel67...no idea what your referring to. Are you saying that the people that shit outside don't believe in god? Or are you saying that it was a social mantra as the article suggest? Just wondering....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCultural lag is more pronounced in a very large population. Education is still the principal impasse
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistoward a cleaner lifestyle. Just show and tell does
not impart a strong enough stimulus without a broader
understanding of germ theory, disease spread and so on.
We tend to overlook that in our haste to bring modernity to all the worlds people.
What is so ironic is that the laws of natural selection and the continuation of dreadful and fatal habits and activities has for eternity been the conduit to limit certain rules of nature, i.e., runaway population and destruction of the planet. It is this which man in his humanity because of the horrors known and the suffering resulting from not only unsanitary and unsafe living conditions and practices and the concern and sympathy for the welfare of members of our tribe, no matter how remote and far flung they may be, have taken to make life more bearable for those for all the various reasons are unaware of the consequences they place themselves in to their peril.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sure even the extremely marginalized would, had they the education, desire a better way of life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have a point with respect to nature's efforts, however harsh, to control population. Over a billion
people living from 80-100 yrs of age might prove disastrous.
Seriously none of you commenting picked up on the bad games the supposed Wash organization is using to teach poor people to be "clean!" Get Real people! "Leaders organize interactive games such as Poo Minefield, where a blindfolded contestant must avoid the piles of excreta and pick up soap bars." Seriously, an educated person would never find it "clean" to blind someone and then have that person walk through excreta! The article also stated "a single gram of feces can carry 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. These hazards can be carried back on feet and fingers into food and water. Uncovered waste kills more children annually than HIV/AIDS, TB and measles combined." ANYONE THAT IS INTELLIGENT AND OF SOUND-MIND WOULD NEVER PROMOTE, SET A PERSON UP, OR WATCH IN "FUN" SOMEONE FALLING IN A GROUND OF VIRUSES, BACTERIA, PARASITES, DISEASE, ETC.!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe as a human society should be looking into the WASH organization and asking why they think setting up a person to become diseased is a "clean" idea. Here in the United States and other countries there are laws put in place to keep people from purposely harming other people. WHERE IS THE UNITED NATIONS AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS TO STOP THESE ILL-ADVISED AND ULTIMATELY HARMFUL "GAMES?"
Umm...I think that they use plastic models. That seems to be the most likely scenario.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHas all the cleanliness of USA stopped "Various types f Cancers ???" Why not ??? Where is the catch ??? Those people who do not know how to clean the "ASS" after defication, how can they teach us lessons of cleanliness. We Indians use ' Water" and not "Paper' to do it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi Sensibility. Thank you for showing interest in the subject and for speaking your mind on the subject..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, I believe that you have a completely wrong idea in mind of the games at the Great WASH Yatra. We would of course never put someone in contact with excrements for fun.
here's an image of the game: http://bit.ly/poominefield
I suggest that you have a look at the diary on WASH United's website on www.wash-united.org, or on http://www.nirmalbharatyatra.org/gallery to the see games in images (and described).
Very refreshing info - thanks a lot! The majority tends to forget: its not about health, nor about bacteria count per shit pile... Its about survival of a civilization. Believe me, given the same conditions they will survive (as they do now) and you won't - for your bacteria count is too low :(( I have seen kids growing up together with chicken - practically swiping chicken shit over their faces. Pretty healthy kids they were! Please worry for yourself: the cleaner - the worse. We do need provocation: we become more fit :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery refreshing info - thanks a lot! The majority tends to forget: its not about health, nor about bacteria count per shit pile... Its about survival of a civilization. Believe me, given the same conditions they will survive (as they do now) and you won't - for your bacteria count is too low :(( I have seen kids growing up together with chicken - practically swiping chicken shit over their faces. Pretty healthy kids they were! Please worry for yourself: the cleaner - the worse. We do need provocation: we become more fit :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSensibility be sensible, it's a game, they are not actually walking around or throwing real poo. It's also not a real mine field either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSemansys...One of the primary reasons to not "go" in the open is to prevent the spread of disease and parasites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisexample: Cholera..3-5 million infected every year with +100k deaths.