Women in India are walking out on their grooms for one crappy reason – their matrimonial homes lack bathrooms

By Belmont Lay 

After years of squatting in open fields in darkness, braving snakes and harassment from passing men, women in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have decided to f*ck this shit, threatening their future husbands with the prospect of endless shame from being left at the alter, in exchange for decent toilets at home.

A lack of toilets apparently is also the cause for girls dropping out of Only  four in ten government schools in Delhi have access to functioning toilets for girls, the study said, which played a dominant role in the ability of female students to attend school.

The World Bank says the lack of such facilities costs India nearly US$54 billion a year in productivity and other losses — in large measure due to the impact on women. The United Nations Development Programme says that fewer than 35% of women in India get paid work.According to its conservative estimates, the gross domestic product could easily increase by 2-4% annually if the employment rate for women grows to 70%.

Excreta Matters

 By Sunita Narain,    Down to Earth Jan 31, 2013

How urban India is soaking up water, polluting rivers and drowning in its own excreta. It has a seemingly simple plot: it only asks where Indian cities get their water from and where does their waste go. But this is not just a question or answer about water, pollution and waste. It is about the way Indian cities (and perhaps other parts of the world that are similarly placed) will develop. It is about the paradigm of growth that’s sustainable and affordable.

Illustration: Karno Guhathakurta Water is life and sewage tells its life story. This is the subject of the Citizens’ Seventh Report on the State of India’s Environment

Urbanisation in India, relentless as it is, will only grow. How should the country manage its water needs so that it does not drown in its own excreta? This is what the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has asked and tried to answer in the book. What has amazed us is the lack of data, research and understanding of this issue in the country. This is when water concerns all. People in cities get water in their houses; they discharge waste; and they see their rivers die. But they don’t make the connection, between flushing toilet and dying rivers. It is as if they do not want to know. But they should. 

Is this a reflection of the caste system of Indian society, where removing waste is somebody else’s business? Or is it a reflection of current governance systems, where water and waste are government’s business, and within that the business of a lowly water and sanitation bureaucracy? Or is it simply a reflection of Indian society’s extreme arrogance—it believes it can fix it all as and when it gets rich; that water scarcity and waste are only a temporary problem; that once it gets rich, infrastructure will be built, water will flow and the embarrassing stink of excreta in cities will just disappear. 

It is clear Indians know little about the water they use and the waste they discharge. We at CSE had to collect data the hard way—city by city, ferreting out the material from government offices, which are rarely visited by researchers. The second volume—71 cities: water-excreta survey—of the seventh citizens’ report puts together individual city profiles. Each city is mapped to know more about its past, current and future water footprint. Each city is mapped to know more about where the waste generated from such use of water goes. It is a geography lesson that’s essential to learn.

It was way back in the late 1990s that environmentalist Anil Agarwal, who conceived and crafted the State of India’s Environment reports, had said one needs to understand the political economy of defecation, where the rich are subsidised to excrete in convenience.

Now when we researched for this report, which explains the political economy of defecation, we were struck by one fact that should make us all angry, really angry. We found countless instances where a city’s drain, called nullah today, was actually a river. Delhi residents are familiar with Najafgarh drain, which discharges the city’s waste into the Yamuna. But most of them do not know that this “drain” has its source in the lake Sahibi. Now Sahibi is gone, and what has replaced it in livingmemory is a drain carrying only filth, not water. Worse, New Gurgaon is now dumping its sewage into the same Najafgarh jheel (lake).

Buddha Nullah in Ludhiana is referred to as a drain because it is that—full of stench and filth. But not so long ago Buddha was called darya (river). It was a clean freshwater stream. One generation has changed its form and name.

The Mithi is Maximum City’s shame. When floods drowned Mumbai in 2005, it learnt it had a clogged drain called Mithi, marred by encroachments. It did not realise that the Mithi had not shamed the city, the city had shamed the Mithi. This “drain”, which originates near the city, is really a river. It was recognised as a river. It flowed like one. But today even official environmental status report calls this living river a storm water drain. One more city has lost its river. These lost rivers are our collective shame. 

But should Indians be surprised? Today they take water from their rivers—for irrigation, drinking and hydro-electric plants—and give back waste. Water no more flows in its rivers. It is the load of excreta and industrial effluent.

Indians should be angry over the loss of rivers. More worryingly, if they do not change their ways they will lose the remaining rivers, lakes and other water bodies. This generation will then not just be pitied for losing rivers, but accused of committed deliberate “hydrocide”. Coming generations will forget that the Yamuna, Cauvery and the Damodar were rivers. They will know them as drains, only drains.
 

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.”