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. 2nd
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
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