Toilets before Temples

Indian PM Narendra Modi Brings Vision Of "Toilets Before Temples" To A U.S. Audience (Abbreviated)

 By Jeff Chu, m.fastcompany.com   September 29th 2014 3:49 PM

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood on a stage in Central Park and saluted 60,000 mostly youthful activists who had earned tickets to the Global Citizen Festival through their work against global poverty. The organizers had invited him to highlight his pledge to expand sanitation in India and end open defecation. Modi called on activists to get behind a plan to end open defecation and install toilets in every Indian home.

He said it was a formidable challenge of ending open defecation in India by 2019--the 150^th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. This is a message he had earlier shared with the country during his Indian Independence Day speech: “We need to build toilets before we build more temples.” Modi sees the elevation of sanitation standards as a key measure to eradicate extreme poverty, develop the Indian economy, and make it friendlier to outside investment. There’s already plenty of funding for his sanitation initiatives, with Indian companies having pledged tens of millions of dollars for more toilets.

However, even where there are public toilets in India, they are often not well maintained. Open-air defecation is seen as more sanitary in many communities. One villager said: “I go for my morning walk and I relieve myself in a field. I am one with nature.” Others said it is unhygienic to share a toilet with others: “Why would I want to go into a room where my sister or mother or brother relieved themselves? That is unsanitary.”

One woman who owned a sparklingly clean indoor toilet would not allow anyone else to use it. To capitalize on the sense of ownership, Modi plans to make the toilet each household’s crown jewel. By 2019, he hopes that every household and every school in the country will have its own toilet. “It will become a private asset,” Evans says, “and all signs point to private assets being kept in better repair than public ones.”

The infrastructure build out will need to be accompanied by massive education to shift mindsets. and while outsiders can provide support, it will only be community members themselves who can create change. They traveled to one village where a group of female elders told them a story about how they had educated the entire community about the importance of indoor toilets.

“They didn’t say ‘defecation.’ They said ‘shit.’ They said, ‘Just because you take a shit in the field doesn’t mean it stays there. The flies that just landed on your food also landed on that shit,’”  “One woman held up a glass of water and said, ‘Who would drink this?’ Everyone raised their hands and they passed the glass around. Then she took a piece of hair and slid it through a piece of shit. Then she stuck the hair in the water and asked, ‘Who wants to take a sip of this water?’” Nobody volunteered. The woman continued: “What you don’t understand is that the fly has four legs that are the same size as the hair. When the fly lands on the shit and then your food, you are eating your neighbor’s shit. You don’t even like your neighbor--and you’re eating your neighbor’s shit.” Within months, a community of 380 homes, only 10% of which had previously had indoor toilets, had been entirely converted.

To replicate this change in thousands of Indian communities, Modi went on, “Some believe that the world changes with the wisdom of the old, I think that the idealism, innovation, energy and ‘can-do’ attitude of the youth is even more powerful.” Then, in a perhaps unwitting nod to the otherworldly help his effort might need too, he saluted the crowd and said, “May the force be with you.”