Sometimes You Need to Get Your Hands Dirty. Happily.
Comptroller and Auditor General of India
THERE WAS A time, not too long ago, when human excreta was not exactly a popular topic of conversation. It seldom came up in social discussions among adults, and definitely not among the top brass of the Government. But I faced no predicament when an old friend, and now the Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Param Iyer, invited me to accompany him to empty out a pit full of decomposed excreta: my response was an unhesitating ‘YES!’ The invitation led to an experience that I will cherish forever – the opportunity to observe Bharatmata being made ‘Swachh’ at close quarters. And when I say close, I mean really close!
Sanitation, and the building of an Open Defecation Free (ODF) nation, always had to be everybody’s concern. Like me, most Indians dream of a clean India. Then, the idea of shovelling excreta which is so completely decomposed that it is popularly called ‘sona-khaad’ should make no Indian, who calls himself ‘educated’, hesitate. If they do not lead by example, they are not really educated – merely (and at best) literate. Recall Gandhiji cleaning his own and his Ashram’s toilets: the one truly educated Indian.
Within weeks of my first conversation about it with Param, I found myself in the beautiful city of Pune on a balmy Wednesday evening, having dinner with him, as he passionately explained to me the workings of the twin-pit toilet, which the Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) has been propagating for most of rural India. He explained in graphic detail how the toilet is made of two leach pits, each approximately 1 metre wide and just as deep. Initially, waste from the toilet is directed into one of the pits. The waste water leaches away from the pit and it takes around five years of regular use by a family of five for the pit to fill up. Once a pit fills, the household can redirect the waste to the other pit. While the second pit starts filling, the solid waste in the first one begins decomposing and in about a year’s time, it decomposes completely, and is converted into compost that can be used in the fields as a fertilizer rich in nutrients, proven to enhance crop yield. Hence the name ‘sona-khaad’.
The idea behind us emptying a pit was to make the point that this compost is safe to handle, and to defy myths and social stigmas around handling ‘faeces’. It was also to practically demonstrate that people can empty the compost from their toilet pits themselves. Hardly a subject of regular dinner-table conversation, but this was the one real ‘business’ dinner I have attended, because what ODF implies is more than just a clean and disease-free India; it is the task of protecting the dignity of all rural Indians, especially the women.
The next morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn and began our drive to Daund block of Pune district, 85 kilometres from Pune city. This was where we were to meet Deepak Govind Jadhav and his family, whose toilet we had come to clean.
As an urban dweller, regardless of how many times you may have visited one before, there really is nothing like the beauty of a clean, well-mapped village. This was the sight that welcomed us to Pandharewadi Gram, home to Mr Jadhav and family. I knew that Maharashtra had declared itself ODF recently, yet the sight of a toilet standing, colourful and proud, in the veranda of each and every household in the village filled me with indescribable pride.
Deepak and his family stood outside their house, welcoming us warmly to their village and humble home. I wondered what they must have felt then, seeing a bunch of the distant bureaucrats who had come all the way from Delhi – and that too to clean out their toilet! We approached the pit which, we were informed, had filled over a year back and was full of compost by now. The lid was opened and we got right down to business. I jumped in with a shovel in my hand. There were no surprises. Exactly as Param had said: there was no odour whatsoever, not even the slightest, and to take my considerable weight, the compost had to be as solid as the land around the pit. I immediately set aside my shovel and started taking out the compost with my bare hands – the shovel was really just slowing me down in the narrow pit. One by one, our entire motley group – senior officers of the Government of India, Additional Chief Secretaries from many states and officers of the Government of Maharashtra – entered Deepak’s toilet pit and mined wealth from waste, ‘sona-khaad’. A truly memorable morning!
Back at home in Delhi that evening, I couldn’t help but think about the progress figures of the Swachh Bharat Mission that Param had reeled off and given to me as part of my written brief. As of June 2019, these numbers stand at 9.7 crore toilets built in four and a half years, 30 states/UTs, 622 districts, 5.6 lakh villages declared ODF! Obviously, a mammoth achievement that should do us all proud.
The knowledge that Deepak’s wife, the other women in his joint family, and their children, especially the girl-children, as well as all the households in that village were now using toilets, and were no longer shamed in the open, filled me with a mixture of deep satisfaction, pride, and lots of hope. We can indeed make India ODF, and restore to our fellow Indians the dignity they deserve. We can clean our cities, our villages, and our rivers. We can make India pure and ‘Swachh’.