The Truth Stinks: India’s Sanitation Problem

Melissa Eswein, globalsolutionspgh.org    July 16, 2014

Have you ever read a news story online that stuck with you, lingering in the back of your mind for the next few days after finishing it? On Tuesday, I shared this article on GSP’s Facebook page (if you haven’t liked the page yet, what are you waiting for?), and two days later, I still don’t think I have fully picked my jaw up off the floor. I knew that sanitation was a problem in India, but in a very abstract way, like it only happened to the extremely poor. It wasn’t until reading that not having access to toilets has made children actually malnourished– children that have access to healthy food and enough to eat—that I realized the gravity of the situation.

Half of India’s population defecate in the open. That is 638 million people. More people have televisions and cell phones than have access to a bathroom. When I read that fact, I had to check to make sure I wasn’t reading a satirical website, like The Onion. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Because so many people defecate in the open, children are exposed to bacteria that causes their growth to be stunted because their immune systems are too busy fighting roundworms and amoebas to support development. About 200,000 children under the age of four die each year. For the children that do survive, they are still impacted by the cognitive damage of lack of sanitation. In one study, six year olds who had access to bathrooms during their first year of life recognized more letters and numbers on tests than those who hadn’t. Later in adolescence, girls often have to drop out of school due to lack of bathroom facilities in school buildings.

Cue my immediate guilt for every time I have ever complained about less-than-meticulously cleaned public restrooms. I think those are bad and most Indian rivers are essentially open sewers because there is not an effective waste treatment system anywhere. Fortunately, over the last two decades, the government has made reversing the sanitation issues a priority by spending Rs1,250 billion on water and sanitation projects. They have been working to pay for more toilets, however, there is still the cultural obstacle of open defecation to overcome.

It may sound strange that once people have access to toilets, they still don’t use them, but it’s happening. In the words of one campaigner: “The government is mechanically releasing the money and targeting toilet construction without paying any attention to community involvement. As a result, most of the toilets, especially in rural areas, are lying non-functional. People use these toilets for storing fodder or cow dung cakes.” Therefore it is the job of Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) to change the community’s opinion about the commonly held practice. The group’s goal is to eliminate open defecation by 2017. Another problem surrounds the caste system- many of the poor from the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households are restricted to only using community facilities, where women face the risk of abuse.