Toilets and Urinals

Water is probably the worst medium to treat or transport human refuse. And that is exactly what we use when we flush our poo and pee with buckets full of water. Water only increases the size of the problem - bowl sized refuse gets converted into bucket sizes – and offers absolutely no help to treat the waste.

With empty fields as far as eyes can perceive and perpetual water shortage, introducing flush toilets sure seemed the biggest challenge in the predominantly dry state of Rajasthan. A total of 321 Gram Panchayats have won the Nirmal Gram Puraskar in the state, but in India’s largest state, this amounts to less than 4% of the total number of Gram Panchayats present.

Despite the launch of the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 2002, Hamirpur district in Himachal Pradesh remained almost cut off from the toilet frenzy until 2006-07. Nearly 56% of households had no individual toilets when the campaign was initially launched. Five years into the campaign, less than 1% of the set target was achieved.

Arghyam, a charitable trust working in water and sanitation in India, piloted a behaviour change communication campaign in 25 Gram Panchayats of Davangere district of Karnataka.

With over 638 million people defecating in the open, India’s obsession with constructing toilets is not surprising. In a bid to arrest the number of people going out to answer nature’s call, successive governments have been pushing their total sanitation drive under different names.