The Sanitation Issue in India: Hype or Real?

It is important to be clean and it is of utmost importance to keep the environment clean. Healthy environment leads to healthy lifestyle, healthy life style leads to healthy body and healthy body leads to healthy mind. Citing this, our Hon’ble Prime Minister Sh. Narendra Modi ji has started a         “ Clean India Campaign” or in Hindi it can be called as “Swach Bharat Abhiyan”. He is the first Prime Minister to take such initiative in the entire Indian political history. It’s a major step of his vision to make India Clean and Healthy. He is following the footsteps of “father of the nation” Sh. Mahatma Gandhi. He announced this campaign on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday i.e. 2^nd October last year.

When Hon’ble Prime Minister, Sh. Narendra Modi ji spoke of “Swach Bharat Abhiyan” it was indeed a moment of perceive change last year. At least, most Indians think Swach Bharat as a campaign can do much more than change the habit that Indian have been used to, since years.

A debate has arisen in different spheres of society that the emphasis on sanitation is only hype or it’s the reality. If you analyze all the aspects and take a look around, you will get to know what it is. Mentioning this, it’s a fact that it is true. The sanitation is in real bad condition in India, be it rural India or urban India. Yes, the situation in rural India is much worse if compared to urban India. It’s a very common sight in India to see people defecating openly on railway tracks, footpaths etc. Waste dumping is somewhat an embarrassing thing in the west. But, India seems to take pride in it, assuming as far as ‘my’ home is clean, the surroundings need not be worried about. The seeds of callousness have grown right from here. Waste dumping for Indians is as much a second nature as cutting or jumping queue is. It a considered okay, and is usually even put up with just a whimper or less. When our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Sh. Narendra Modi is speaking of keeping the country clean, and that including our surroundings; it is perhaps time to sit up and take notices.

The condition in rural India is more worrying, Majority of the population, in rural India, goes out for defecating in open even if they have toilets at their home. Lack of awareness about sanitation may well be the reason for this. People are not aware about importance of a clean environment and how an unhealthy environment can affect their health in a dangerous way. There is an urgent need to make the rural people aware about the hazards of an unclean environment. They also throw their dust and waste in the streets and give no importance to cleanliness. The situation in urban India is not as triggering but it is not good also. In urban India, People doesn’t go out for defecating as they have well maintained washrooms at their home, but still the condition of the roads and streets tells a lot about the lack of importance people giving to environmental cleanliness.

The Swach Bharat Abhiyan targets at making India clean by 2020 by making 11 crores toilet in five years going at the rate of one toilet every second. This statement alone tells a lot about the sanitation situation in India.

The fledging Swach Bharat Mission (SBM) is PM Modi’s flagship initiative. Unfortunately for India, sanitation programmes in the past have merely remained slogans and gimmicks. Nothing has changed the way Indians have been looking at their waste problem, which is growing in leaps and bounds cities. As a result of increased consumerism, Indian villages near the urban pockets are turning  into virtual dumpyards because the cities have neither managed their growth, nor their waste. A nearby village turning into a waste zone is the most knee-jerk and natural reaction of economic prowess the cities unleash on the hapless villages which may not even have political representation.

We have a long history of failed or unsuccessful sanitation programmes. In the past, the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (1986-99) failed because it was viewed as a programme that was focused on building toilets. The primary reason for its failure was, India hadn’t even addressed the issue of open defecation being harmful and the habit had to be changed. The recycled total Sanitation Campaign that came by failed to even lift the spirits that its predecessor had left behind. Later, the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan that was launched in 2012 gave some important lessons as to how sanitation programme couldn’t be conceptualized. At the root of every failed sanitation programme is the ignorant Indian, or the Indian who is bound by his habits and culture. Unless we address the root of that, all sanitation programmes can use up public money and rest in peace.

With Swach Bharat Abhiyan/ Mission something has begun to look up as far as the spirit is concerned. This is a very ambitious programme that can influence the behaviour of millions of Indians who have remained as unchanged as they were, to the extent that they can make you think we are living in ‘stone age’. The urban areas are in a tearing hurry to change their image and catch up with their ‘swanky’ economy. What they aren’t realizing perhaps is they are equally contributing to the dirt problem on two levels. One being their consumeristic behaviour, and the second one being the problem of migrants who come to urban areas in search of jobs and livelihood.

In both cases, there is a huge section of people who are left untouched and unaddressed with regard to the ‘clean India’ image. Unless the Swach Bharat Abhiyan can move into the deeper psyche of Indian who belong to different economic stratas, it would be difficult to make the campaign work.

Under the guidelines of Swach Bharat Abhiyan, it is slated that workshops should be organized in the rural areas to make them aware about healthy environment and harms of defecating in the open. In these workshops, people are encouraged to build their own toilets. If you get something built by the people themselves, they will use it and they will construct it according to their needs. It is a very important aspect to make the rural people aware of it because only through awareness they can stop doing such practices by the Delhi based RICE Institute across five north Indian states found that over 40 percent of households with a functional latrine had at least one person defecating in the open.

It is all about the mindset. You have to create a mindset change. People have carefree attitude towards sanitation and are not aware about its harmful impacts. They have set their mind that nothing harmful can arise from this. This needs to be changed and it can de done through regular workshops and by opening informative centres to provide information is not required and they thing liek this because they doesn’t know the truth and they are far from reality. A reality check is required for those people and it is need to be done on urgent basis.

We talked about the dignity of gram panchayat as being able to provide a dignified atmosphere for women. When women became the central focus pint, the issue became that any village which didn’t have toilets, whose women and whose daughters and daughters in law were going out, this issue became the lack of dignity so to speak of the village. This is also due to lack of awareness. There is also a need to build literacy over use of toilets. People need to be literate about the use of toilets and how they can contribute in creating a clean and  healthy environment by using the toilets and by not defecating in the open.

In a survey conducted in the villages October last year, it was found in village after village, that in the toilets build by the local authorities or district administration, no one had consulted villagers on the locations, design or operation of the toilet. No one had briefed them on the health risks of open defecation. As a result, most of the toilets were unused, some turned to store rooms for grain and fertilizer.

People needs to be aware and literate about sanitation, then and only then, our villages can be clean, our cities can be clean and if the villages and cities and clean, then the dream of clean and healthy India will also be a reality one day.

As of now, the campaign is using up the mite stirred by Prime Minister Modi. Social media being the most powerful weapon and Modi being the most promising and popular face, India can sure make some serious changes in the way it treats its waste.

Else, the time won’t be too far when the world will come to India with only those proposals that include dumping or processing of waste. At which time, the economic growth will make little or no sense.

Solving India’s sanitation is not merely a project of toilet construction but an excise in behavioural change is now an increasingly accepted truth. Hence, it is the duty of every Indian to keep the clean momentum going by adopting the behaviour of keeping environment clean and thus contributing towards healthy environment and achieving clean India Mission by 2020