India's No.2 Problem

“Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.”

—V.S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness, 1964

Not to put too fine a point on it, India’s no. 1 problem is no. 2. And for an all-too-brief while last week, the squatting figures dotting the landscape—“eternal and emblematic as Rodin’s thinker” in the Nobel laureate’s immortal words—looked set to emerge out of the bushes and shadows in an election season, as the bjp’s Narendra Modi, whose advertised motto is “India First”, mom­entarily gave flight to his vision of “Toilet First”.

“My image does not permit me to say so, but my real thought is, ‘Pehle shauchalaya, phir devalaya (Toilets first, temples later)’,” Modi said, as he sought to buff up his image as more than just a Hindutva leader. “It’s a sad situation that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open. Villages have hundreds of thousands of temples but no washrooms. This is bad. Gandhiji gave so much importance to this issue.”

Holy shit! Had wisdom finally dawned on those sitting on the throne (and those aspiring), 50 years after Naipaul’s whiplash? Union minister Jairam Ramesh had only six months ago said more or less the same thing. That 64 per cent of Indians still do it in the open, a global record. That this is the main cause of India’s malnutrition. And that—hold on to the seat of your pants—this costs the nation $54 billion (Rs 3,24,000 crore) every year in premature deaths and treatment of the sick, wasted time and productivity, and lost tourism revenues.

“There is no use blasting Agni missiles if the sanitation problem is not solved,” Jairam, who confesses he spends most of his waking hours thinking about toilets, said. “It’s more important than the launch of Agni missiles. If there are no toilets, then Agni is of no use. The price of just one fighter aircraft is enough to free one thousand villages from open defecation.”

With India’s two biggest political parties seemingly on the same page on the issue, the stage seemed miraculously set for a long, hard look at why we are like this only—and the way forward. But the familiar bad odour of mutual recrimination, over whether such belated BJP enlightenment would have spared the demolition of Babri Masjid and all else that has followed, buried India’s sitting shame under a rubble of platitudes and cliches. A squeamish nation turned its nose away—it’s after all stee­ped in a caste system defined by avoidance of this subject. All the factors that have pockmarked India’s insensitive approach to a basic right of citizens—hygiene, sanitation, health—were again on stark display. And a promising toilet story hit an all-too-familiar pause, unfortunate for the two out of every three Indians who battle diarrhoea, malaria, trachoma and intestinal worms every day of their lives because we don’t stare the problem in the face.

While men will be boys, merrily using walls to relieve themselves and joking at those who can’t, those who feel the brunt of this lackadaisical political approach are women, the poor, the homeless, the landless, and the differently abled, who are condemned to perform what is a normal bodily function in the most demeaning of circumstances because the state cannot provide. And if the situation in metropolitan India is pathetic, it’s positively subhuman in territories beyond it. A few soundbites from the vast countryside to put things in perpsective:

• “We don’t drink too much water before coming to school so that we don’t have to use the toilet. It’s always dirty. In case it’s urgent, we take permission from the teacher and go home,” confessed a Pune municipal school student in a newspaper report last year.
• “We had a harrowing time recently when we went to riot-hit Muzaffarnagar,” recalls Shahira Naim, a Lucknow-based activist who was in the riot-hit town on a fact-finding mission. “The all-women team discovered that at most places they had to use common toilets...and the architecture was such that women had to approach the toilets in public view.”
• “I and my colleagues hurry home whenever there is the need because it’s not always possible for us to ask for the key to the only functional toilet, the one attached to the principal’s office,” says a lecturer in a Jharkhand women’s college.
• “We have to walk several kilometres in the dark in search of public land to relieve ourselves because there is always a group of armed, leering men following us to ensure that we do not squat on private land,” says a landless Dalit woman in Andhra Pradesh.
• Activists Minu Gandhi and Usha Deshmukh have been quoted as saying that while municipal toilets in Mumbai did not charge men for urinating, the women were forced to pay. The caretakers would apparently leer and ask, “How do we know you were urinating?”

Indeed, Jairam Ramesh’s fate as a minister in the Manmohan Singh team underlines the low priority accorded to an issue dogged by stereotypes of gender, caste, class and privilege. When Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy confessed in an interview that he washed the toilet when he reached home at night, the news was received with incredulousness. A rich man cleaning his own and admitting to it on TV? Sacrilege.

Ditto Jairam. When he advocated toilets over temples, wary Congress leaders distanced themselves from him, and Sangh parivar activists urinated outside his bungalow in protest. When he persuaded Vidya Balan to be brand ambassador for the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan, people wondered how much money was being paid to the popular actress. When he coined the slogan “No toilet, no bride,” there were few takers. Jairam went on record to say that his cabinet colleagues often made fun of him for his obsession with toilets. Indeed, the buzz is that the sanitation portfolio was taken away from him for precisely that reason.

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