The sanitation crisis in India - An urgent need to look beyond toilet provision

Guest post by

: 

Aarti Kelkar-Khambete

Image Courtesy

: Wikimedia Commons

The sanitation crisis and the recent evidence on lack of toilet facilities 

Recent evidence indicates that India is heading towards a major sanitation crisis in the coming years. The fastest growing economy seems to have missed out on having adequate toilet facilities for as high as 65% of its population. For example, nearly half of India’s 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home, but more than half of India's people own a mobile phone, indicates the latest census data [

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According to the census of 2011, 53.1% (63.6% in 2001) of the households in India do not have a toilet, with the percentage being as high as 69.3% (78.1% in 2001) in rural areas and 18.6% (26.3% in 2001) in urban areas [

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These facts have also been reconfirmed by another report released on 6th March 2012 by the WHO/UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Programme on sanitation for the Millennium Development Goals, which has also indicated that 59% (626 million) Indians still do not have access to toilets and practice open defecation 

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Within India amongst the different states, Jharkhand tops the list with as high as 77% of homes having no toilet facilities, while the figure is 76.6% for Orissa and 75.8% in Bihar. All three are among India’s poorest states with huge populations that live on less than Rs 50/- a day [

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Lack of access to water supply and drainage facilities and implications for sanitation

In addition to more than half of Indian homes having no toilets within their premises, access to water supply and drainage facilities is also another serious problem. For example, two-thirds of Indian homes have no drinking water facility from a treated tap source, and four-fifths are devoid of closed drainage connectivity for discharge of wastewater [

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The still widespread practice of manual scavenging

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

A typical toilet in rural India

Increase in budget allocation and plan for better monitoring systems by the Planning Commission in response to this crisis

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A detailed exercise is also being conducted to identify the shortcomings of the existing sanitation and drinking water efforts and incorporate them into the 12th Five Year Plan [

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Integration of housing, water and sanitation programmes in the 12th Five Year Plan

The Steering Committee of the Planning Commission has also pointed out that one of the major drawbacks of the current approach to National Rural Drinking Water Programme and Total Sanitation Campaign is that water and sanitation are taken as independent activities. Therefore in the 12th Plan, a need has been identified for integration of housing, water and sanitation needs. It also recommended that the Government should converge water and sanitation programmes with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in the 12th Plan [

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Introduction of a new Act on manual scavenging

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

A pay and use public toilet

Is increase in resources a solution to the problem?

The fault probably lies with the approach and the way in which problems are understood as and solutions implemented. For example, many times, centralised, narrow, target-oriented programmes that do not take into consideration the genuine local and contextual needs of the people, the micro-realities of the areas, the underlying socio-cultural factors influencing behaviours of people and the lack of involvement of people and consideration to the long term sustainability of the programmes, have found to yield very limited results.

For example, in rural areas, the sanitation programme in India has been accused of being only about constructing a toilet for stopping the practice of open defecation through awards like Nirmal Gram Puraskar. However, many villages tend to revert to open defecation practices. Will just more number of toilets help in dealing with the situation? Current evidence indicates the contrary. For example, India has been constructing 1.5 million toilets a year under its Total Sanitation Campaign. However, 50 per cent of them remain unused, according to the admission by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself at SACOSAN in Delhi in 2008 [

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Factors affecting toilet use

A number of factors have been found to play an important role in determining toilet use. Sticking to toilet-using habit depends on construction aspects such as a good and well maintained, user friendly structure that protects privacy, has availability of water and where the owners are aware of the benefits of good sanitation. For example, the experiences such as those of an organisation working in Odisha have shown that ensuring availability of well constructed toilets with assured water supply along with motivation and taking up of responsibility of maintenance of toilets at the community level, helped in making toilets sustainable in the long run [

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• Absence of mechanisms to maintain the toilets
• Lack of plumbing and drainage facilities
• Lack of water, lack of adequate and systematically designed sewage systems
• Inadequate mechanisms to maintain these sewage pipelines
• Absence of grievance redressal mechanisms
• Poor consideration of gender-based factors such as security concerns, extra charges for women, lack of attention to accessibility factors such as separate entrance for women, have further led to reduced use of toilets among women [

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Operational aspects such as well-defined institutional roles and mechanisms, appropriate plans for management of funds, coordination between the departments to deal with all the aspects of sanitation, empowerment and capacity building of people within these institutions and use of improved and appropriate technologies have also been found to be important determinants for improving sanitation outcomes. Current evidence indicates that there is a gap between the number of toilets provided by the Total Sanitation Campaign and the actual existing toilets according to the census figures, which suggests a gross mismanagement of funds, which in turn has significantly hindered the progress in sanitation [

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Evidence also suggests that there cannot be blanket centralised solutions for all the parts of the country. There are significant differences among urban and rural populations in terms of the attitudes, perceptions, resources available, local needs as well as by states as well as geographical areas, which need to be taken into consideration while meeting the sanitation needs of the people. It has now been realised that there is a need to focus on what can be called as software or addressing a range of factors that affect demand generation of toilets among people, which is as important as the hardware or in other words, social engineering as much as conventional construction [

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The new rural development policy and beyond

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Image source: Wikimedia Commons

An ecosan toilet

(The author is a public health researcher based in Trivandrum, and works with the India Water Portal)

References

1. Farhana Ahmed (2012) Water and sanitation in India’s Census - 2012. Downloaded from the site: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1203/S00268/water-and-sanitation-in-indias-census-2012.htm on 10th April 2012.

2. Sanitation updates (2012), India census: more people have a mobile phone than a household toilet. Downloaded from the site:  http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/india-census-more-people-have-a-mobile-phone-than-a-household-toilet/ on 10th April 2012.

3. The Hindu Business Line (2012) Households have easier access to phones than sanitation, drinking water facilities. Downloaded from the site:  https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/article2991835.ece on 10th April 2012.

4. Alka Pande (2012) No toilets for 53 per cent population of world’s third biggest economy. Downloaded from the site: http://www.citizen-news.org/2012/03/no-toilets-for-53-per-cent-population.html on 10th April 2012.

5.Basant Kumar Mohanty (2012) Census bares the manual scavenging shocker. Downloaded from the site: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120408/jsp/frontpage/story_15348149.jsp  on 10th April 2012.

6. Seema Sindhu (2012) Third fastest economy but 2/3 households sans toilets! Downloaded from the site: http://www.dailypioneer.com/home/online-channel/360-todays-newspaper/54485-third-fastest-economy-but-23-households-sans-toilets.html on 10th April 2012

7. Richard Mahapatra (2011) A toilet per second. Downloaded from the website: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/toilet-second on 10th April 2012.

8. Indiatogether (2011) Reaching the unserved in cities. Downloaded from the site: http://www.indiatogether.org/2011/apr/hlt-sanit.htm on 10th April 2012

9. Chambers, Robert (2012) Reflections on India's enormous sanitation challenges and some opportunities. Downloaded from the site:  http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/blog/reflections-indias-enormous-sanitation-challenges-and-some-opportunities on 10th April 2012

10. FINISH (2010) Urban Sanitation. Downloaded from the website: http://www.finishsociety.com/page.php?page_id=36 on 10th April 2012

11. CPR (2012) Sanitation drive: A policy mismatch. Downloaded from the website:
https://www.livemint.com/2012/02/28100550/Sanitation-drive-A-policy-mis.html on 10th April 2012.

12. Basant Kumar Mohanty (2012) Toilet scam leaps out of closet: Govt and census figures show disparity of 3.5 crore latrines Downloaded from the website: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120418/jsp/frontpage/story_15387948.jsp on 17th April 2012.

13. UNICEF and WHO (2012) Progress on drinking water and sanitation: A 2012 update.