As efforts are made
to make India open defecation free by 2019, the biggest stumbling block
is not the lack of enough toilets, but the difficulty in convincing
people to start using them.
New Delhi: Despite
freshly-constructed functioning toilets in their homes, a group of old
men in a village in Daniyawan block, about 30 km southeast of Patna
city, continued to go out in the fields to defecate. Asked by sanitation
workers why they were not using the toilets, one of the seniors is said
to have replied, “How can we go to the toilet that is also being used
by our daughters-in-law?”. In a nearby village of the same block, a lady
had spent Rs 35,000 on getting a toilet with tiled flooring constructed
in her house. The five members of her household, however, continued to
go out to defecate. The ‘beautiful’ toilet had been locked by the lady
apparently because she did not want it to get dirty or spoiled.
Those
working on India’s sanitation programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission
(SBM), narrate several such instances of people not adopting toilets
despite having got access to one. The reasons are varied — personal,
traditional, cultural. Some even say that the morning cleansing in the
open is a time for socialising. For many it is just a habit that they
have grown up with, and access to a new toilet is not a compelling
reason to change that habit. As India tries to make itself completely
open defecation free by the year 2019, the biggest stumbling blocks are
not the lack of enough toilets, or accessories like water and
electricity connections, but the difficulty in convincing people to
start using toilets.
“It is not surprising. We observe this kind
of behaviour all the time. Just because a foot over-bridge gets
constructed does not mean that people start using it. They still prefer
to cross the road despite speeding traffic. Don’t we still see people
running on railway tracks to get to another platform? The physical
infrastructure does not necessarily induce change in behaviour. Adoption
of toilets face a similar problem,” said Madhu Krishna who works with
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has been associated with the
India Sanitation Coalition which brings together stakeholders working on
sanitation.
The realisation that making India open defecation
free is much more than just building toilets is not new. There have been
efforts in the past as well to encourage behaviour changes, sometimes
by offering incentives and at others by running mass campaigns. A
recognisable television and radio campaign by leading actress Vidya
Balan has been running for five years now. However, the core of the
sanitation programme has always been achievement of targets on
construction of toilets.
That has changed now, assures
Parmeswaran Iyer, secretary of the Ministry of Drinking Water and
Sanitation which runs the Swachh Bharat Mission. “Our main aim is not to
construct more and more toilets. Rather, we are focusing on usage of
toilets, making villages Open Defecation Free(ODF) and then keeping
them as such. Of course, this can’t happen if there are no toilets in a
village. Infrastructure has to be built. But our work doesn’t end there.
A lot of our effort is going into ensuring that villages that have
become ODF do not slide back into old habits. And that requires our
continued engagement,” Iyer said.
Several initiatives reflect
this change in focus. To start with, ODF has been given a new definition
that emphasises on usage rather than construction of toilets. It means
that even a village or district with 100 per cent individual household
toilets will not be called ODF till all the inhabitants start using
them. A new protocol is being developed to monitor the villages that
have been declared as ODF in order to ensure that they remain so.
In
addition, the ministry has recently started virtual classrooms for
training volunteers on how to encourage people to adopt toilets. The
idea is to create an army of ‘champions’ at the local level.
The
ministry, in the meanwhile, has also been seeking expert advice from
scholars like Val Curtis, director of the Environmental Health Group at
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has worked
extensively on this subject across the world. Curtis says the first big
step in making people change their behaviour with regard to toilets has
already been taken by initiating a conversation around it.
“One
probable reason why sanitation campaign got so delayed in India is that
nobody wants to talk about toilets. It is not part of conversations in
the villages. And when nobody wants to talk about it, the problem
becomes invisible. It is good that it is being talked about now. It is
extremely heartening that the Prime Minister himself is engaging with
this conversation. It is a huge step forward,” she said in a
conversation with The Indian Express.
She said her main job was
to identify the motivations that guide people’s adoption of toilets, and
then work on those motivations through a campaign. “There are no more
than 15 motivations for human behaviour. These include fundamental
motivations like love, hunger or fear. Others include justice, and even
hoarding of objects. We need to know what all motivations work for
people in India to adopt toilets. We need to screen all these different
motives and see which of these levers gets the best results,” she said,
adding that that it would be good idea to refresh the television and
radio campaign on sanitation, like the one involving Vidya Balan, in
order to tap people who have not been influenced by the original
message.
“We will also keep giving something new periodically,
appealing to different motivations of people. Newer campaigns will be
more powerful, more shocking, more surprising. It needs to be developed
into a mass national campaign that everyone can recognise and identify
oneself with,” she said.
Officials say the idea is to repeat and
reinforce the messages through all means, including the use of
newsletters that are plannedtobe delivered to each gram sabha and
cartoon books. The first newsletter the Swachh Bharat Mission is due to
be out this week itself.
The Ministry is also roping in postmen
to trigger the sanitation messages. The postmen have first-hand access
to the communities and are generally trusted by people in the villages.
They can act as very good ‘champions’ at the local level for the
sanitation campaign.
Curtis says the initial part of any
behaviour change campaign requires a lot of effort and messaging.
Eventually, once the behaviour change has been adopted by a critical
mass of people, it becomes self-sustaining.
“People, in general,
are conformists. They do not want to be outliers. They would like to fit
in with the rest of the community. Right now a large number of people
do not have access to toilets. So it seems acceptable to everyone. But
as we get more and more people to adopt toilets, we will soon reach a
critical mass after which the excluded ones would themselves want to
have toilets. We do not notice this but this is a fundamental human
behaviour. This will explain why, with 16 ODF districts out of 677, the
growth may seem slow in the initial months and years. But once that
critical mass is achieved, there will be no looking back and the ODF
movement will scale up at extremely rapid rates.”