[Reader-list] Reg: Article on sanitation - How things can go wrong

[Rakesh Iyer]

Link:
http://southasia.oneworld.net/opinioncomment/the-dirty-truth-behind-community-led-sanitation-in-india

Article:

The dirty truth behind community-led sanitation in India
 * Liz Chatterjee *
  14 June 2011


The community-led scheme for sanitation often uses extremes of coercion to
encourage toilet use. Researcher *Liz Chatterjee* finds that the name and
shame tactics might meet the statistical targets but fails to educate the
locals on its health gains.

Robert Chambers recently wrote that community-led total sanitation is
leading to a development revolution, especially in south Asia. I agree with
his assessment of sanitation's importance. In practice, however, the success
of community-led efforts often hinges on the use of outright coercion. In my
experience, the measures used to encourage the use of toilets range from
stone-throwing and public humiliation to bizarre scare stories about
congenital abnormalities.

Last summer, I travelled to a semi-rural district in the southern Indian
state of Karnataka as part of a four-strong group. India's national Total
Sanitation Campaign had led to an astonishing rise from 20% toilet usage in
the area to almost 100% in just two years. We planned to produce a case
study of success for project sponsors Unicef from which lessons for best
practice could be drawn for the benefit of other parts of the country.

"Best practice" turned out to be slightly alarming. The toilets had indeed
been constructed, local officials had made superhuman efforts, and people of
all classes and castes were using the facilities regularly. But we weren't
prepared for the degree of (often community-backed) coercion used to get the
job done.

*Emotional barriers*

Previous efforts to build toilets in the area failed to ensure actual use.
They were often used to store firewood or chickens while families continued
to defecate outdoors. Most people in a district only 40 miles from the IT
metropolis of Bangalore didn't see the attraction of investing in a toilet,
preferring televisions and mobile phones.

The barriers to toilet usage were often emotional as much as practical. A
Rajasthani once waxed lyrical to me on the joys of open defecation: "I used
to go out into the desert with all my friends. We had our favourite spot -
it was very beautiful and clean. Afterwards we'd all play games together,
and then go again."

Contrast this experience with the foul toilets at bus stations and
hospitals, many people's only experience of defecating indoors, and you get
some idea of why officials and community leaders were united in viewing
emotions as the key battleground for improved sanitation. From our very
first meeting, everyone from senior bureaucrats to local kindergarten
teachers talked proudly of their innovative approach to "persuading" the
more reluctant members of the community to construct a toilet.

*Name and shame tactics
*

At its mildest, this meant squads of teachers and youths, who patrolled the
fields and blew whistles when they spotted people defecating. Schoolchildren
whose families did not have toilets were humiliated in the classroom. Men
followed women - and vice versa - all day, denying people the opportunity
even to urinate. These strategies are the norm, not the exception, and have
also been deployed in Nepal and Bangladesh.

Equally common, though, were more questionable tactics. Squads threw stones
at people defecating. Women were photographed and their pictures displayed
publicly. The local government institution, the gram panchayat, threatened
to cut off households' water and electricity supplies until their owners had
signed contracts promising to build latrines. A handful of very poor people
reported that a toilet had been hastily constructed in their yards without
their consent.

A local official proudly testified to the extremes of the coercion. He had
personally locked up houses when people were out defecating, forcing them to
come to his office and sign a contract to build a toilet before he would
give them the keys. Another time, he had collected a woman's faeces and
dumped them on her kitchen table.

*Health benefits ignored*

These tactics of public shaming bore little relationship to the "good" shame
and fear that community-led total sanitation relies on in its participatory
analysis of how "we are eating one another's shit". People praised toilets
for their convenience and not their health benefits, about which many were
sceptical - including some of the teachers charged with carrying the
campaign forward in the community. Several described toilets as dirtier than
the fields. The vast majority of facilities did not have soap for hand
washing, which meant the expected health gains were lost.

This lack of knowledge testifies to the failure of the education programme
that makes up a critical component of the campaign. Most people did not
realise that microscopic pathogens cause disease. NGOs and officials have
taken the path of least resistance: it is much easier to convince people of
the more tangible evils of mosquitoes or unpleasant smells than to teach
them about invisible germs.

In fact, often the education campaign devolved into sensationalist scare
tactics, consciously intended to shock and terrify. These included graphic
media stories on the rape-murders of women, and dramas about the dangers of
child-snatching, robbery and snakebites while openly defecating (all rare in
the area). In one village, a Unicef-sponsored NGO had even been showing
people grotesque pictures of vast tumours and conjoined twins, suggesting
they were the result of poor sanitation.

How should we feel about this? We concluded that humiliation and fear are
strikingly effective tools. What's the objection, given that the emotional
coercion has been spearheaded by the local community itself? Improved
sanitation is an undeniably great good, especially for women and children.

But we need to stop pretending that decentralised development is necessarily
the ultra-democratic panacea it's often made out to be. As we told Unicef,
the ultimate success of the project in Karnataka was founded on
community-led coercion - not a utopian democratic upsurge. If we think the
ends justify the means, we ought to be honest about it.
*Liz Chatterjee is a DPhil candidate in international development at the
University of Oxford*
-- 
Rakesh Krishnamoorthy Iyer
MM06B019
Final Year, Dual Degree Student
Dept. of Metallurgical & Materials Engineering
IIT Madras, Chennai - 600036
Phone no: +91-9444073884
E-mail ID: rakesh.rnbdj at gmail.com