Journalist
Ten years ago when I moved to the seaside village in Maharashtra where I now live, the one thing I hated was that everyone defecated on the beach. In the mornings, when I went jogging, I would see long lines of women squatting wherever there were patches of wild beach shrubs. When they saw me in my jogging shorts they would giggle and point to my naked legs, seemingly unaware that they were exposing far more than me. Open defecation was socially acceptable. So the village ladies behaved as if they were at a kitty party. They gossiped and giggled and did not mind when tourists stared in horror.
Women defecated, mostly, in the early hours of the morning. Men defecated at all times and anywhere. When the tide was out they squatted on the wet, soggy parts of the beach where the water had receded so that sea water spared them the bother of bringing water with them. There was no escaping the defecators. Not at sunrise and not at sunset. The stench of human excrement so filled the air that I gave up going to the beach. When friends came to visit I warned them to not even think about lying on the beach or bathing in the sea. When the Prime Minister announced from the ramparts of the Red Fort his determination to end the practice of open defecation, I cheered but did not expect him to succeed.
Then because of something critical I wrote about the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) I met Parameswaran Iyer. We met in the Gymkhana Club in Delhi. He introduced himself as Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Sanitation and I think the first thing he said was that I was wrong in saying that the Mission was failing. We ordered eggs – poached for me and an omelette for him – and hot buttery toast and ‘desi’ chai. But, our entire conversation at this very wholesome breakfast was about open defecation in rural India.
I think I said that sanitation was not possible unless there was water and this was scarce in most Indian villages. So he described in detail the twin-pit toilets that they were building which use very little water. When one pit gets filled, he said, it is closed and the other brought into use. In a year the closed pit is transformed into a goldmine of manure. Some days later a newspaper printed a photograph of this tall, refined man standing in a pit running this ‘gold’ through his fingers. I was impressed with his disdain for caste taboos, his passion and his perseverance.
At one of our other meetings, he told me that my village was now ‘ODF’ (Open Defecation Free). I did not believe this possible and conducted my own survey. It astounded me to discover that every house in the village now had a private toilet. These had been built with the subsidies the Government offered under SBM. The beach is now so ODF that it has become a low-budget tourist’s dream. There are tiny restaurants now, coconut stands, jet-skis for hire and horse riding. I became more interested in the Mission and on my rural travels made it a point to ask wherever I went about sanitation. When I came upon a village where open defecation prevailed I reported it to the Secretary.
In early 2018, at one of our breakfast meetings, he told me that the Prime Minister was coming to Champaran to meet SBM volunteers, swachhagrahis. Champaran was chosen because it was where the Mahatma had started his Satyagraha movement. ‘Satyagraha Se Swachhagraha’ was the theme of this conference, he said, and they were expecting thousands of young volunteers to come to Champaran. I said I would love to come if he could promise me a clean toilet. The irony of asking the man in charge of SBM for a clean lavatory made us both laugh. But, decades of covering rural India have left me with a deep horror of dirty toilets.
When I arrived in Champaran on a balmy April evening, the first thing I checked was if my room in the SS Exotica Hotel did indeed have a clean toilet. And, then I wandered towards the vast tented city that had been set up for the swachhagrahis. On the way I saw hundreds of young men and women wearing white jackets and white Gandhi caps and recognized them as the army of sanitation volunteers that SBM has created. In the tented city, I met young girls and boys, who had never left their village before, who told me proudly that they were teaching elders in their village about the importance of ending open defecation.
When I asked how they did this they gave me examples. ‘We put a hair on a pile of shit, then dip it into a glass of water and ask them to drink it. When they refuse we ask them to think how much dirtier their food is when flies who have six legs sit on it after they have sat on human excrement.’ Another example that seemed to have great impact was telling open defecators that the number of Indian children who died every day due to lack of sanitation would fill two jumbo jets.
The more than 20,000 volunteers in this small tented township had come from all over India. They had been inspired to travel to Champaran because they had heard that Bihar was one of the states lagging behind when it came to SBM. They wanted to inspire the Bihari populace to join the movement.
When the Prime Minister arrived the next day he was visibly moved. ‘Prime Ministers are not born with a thousand hands,’ he said, ‘but now I know that you young people have given me a thousand hands.’ He made special mention of Param Iyer and said the movement may not have taken off in the way it had if Param had not played such a key role. I saw my breakfast companion seated quietly in the audience looking more than a little embarrassed. But I second what the Prime Minister said.
Leadership can make all the difference when it comes to a movement like SBM. It was this dedication and the Prime Minister’s passionate support that has made it possible for us to imagine a time when it can no longer be said of Indians what the writer V.S. Naipaul so cruelly did in his book An Area of Darkness : ‘Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.’
These words were written fifty years ago and would probably be true fifty years from now if Narendra Modi had not dared to declare, in an Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, that it was time for open defecation to stop. The Swachh Bharat Mission will be remembered as one of the most important achievements of his first tenure as the Prime Minister of India.