Toilets and Urinals

One of the stated Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations is to improve access to safe drinking water and sanitation and to halve the proportion of population left without the same by 2015.

Whenever Nachatar Singh’s wife and children fall sick, he blames it on the groundwater they pull out everyday using a hand pump in his courtyard at Veere Wala Kalan village of Faridkot district. Singh swears that the problem started only recently. “The same tap used to fetch such good quality water thanks to seepage from the Gang canal which runs around 1 km from our place.

Recognizing the importance of technology in providing safe drinking water and hygienic living conditions, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation has come out with a booklet on innovative and cost effective solutions to provide potable water and sanitation in rural areas.

Swachh Bharat Mission: Gujarat leads the implementation

Provisions relating to water and sanitation are among the 61 items listed as ‘State Subjects’ under the Seventh Schedule in Part XI of the Constitution of India. Despite being catalogued as the responsibility of the states, the Union Government pitches in to supplement the former’s efforts.

The responsibility of implementing the Swachh Bharat Mission is shared between the Ministries of Urban Development and Drinking Water and Sanitation. While the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) is responsible for sanitation in urban areas, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) is in charge of the same in rural India.

Despite India’s multi-decade battle to eliminate open defecation, toilets are absent in 69% of rural India (Census 2011).

Rural sanitation is primarily funded by the Union Government. The state governments and beneficiaries contribute towards construction and maintenance of toilets as well.

In partnership with the Government of Karnataka, Arghyam ran a communication campaign aimed at creating a demand for improved sanitation. 

On-site sanitation systems are options which help treat the waste at source, rather than dealing with it several miles away in a centralized manner. In the absence of sewerage systems and piped supplies, communities have to devise decentralized ways to deal with their shit. Some of the most common on-site sanitation systems include septic tanks and pit latrines.

With over 620 million defecating in the open in India, do we need a new approach to curb this practice? The force of habit is such that even households with toilets have around forty percent of adults defecating in the open. But, does curbing open defecation necessarily lead to significant improvements in child health outcomes like diarrhoea, anaemia, parasite infection and growth?