Is sanitation a public good or a private good?
Suppose you have a toilet – it provides you convenience of relieving yourself at any point of time. It also disposes off the faecal matter of your family safely, without polluting the environment. It is your private good in this sense. Right? But let us take this discussion deeper. Suppose your neighbor does not have a toilet. And he/ his family daefecates behind your wall. Flies sit on that shit deposited by your neighbor. Do they enter your house as well? Can they sit on your food? Even if you have a toilet? If yes, then can a toilet or sanitation be looked upon as a mere private good? Open daefecation by even a few members of a community can put at risk the health of each and every member of the community.
We sail or sink together. Sanitation is a public good.
Sanitation programmes traditionally looked at sanitation in terms of number of toilets. Sanitation coverage has been the most common indicator of sanitation status, reflecting the number of households that have access to toilets. The first and foremost thing that was required in Swachh Bharat, was to shift the emphasis of programme from individual toilets to attainment of complete open daefecation free (ODF) villages. The latter was not a mere continuation of the former: rather it was a significant change in the perspective and approach of the programme. Where earlier the programme would be looked upon as the State’s responsibility to construct individual toilets for the ‘beneficiaries’, without their active involvement in the process, Swachh Bharat with emphasis on ODF was to become a programme where the State looked upon their primary role as facilitating behaviour change of the community at a collective level, so that they could in turn stop the practice of open daefecation by taking collective action.
There were several reasons why this shift was required.
First and foremost, it was understood, that in order to obtain health benefits, what was critical was absence of open daefecation, and not mere construction of toilets. Several studies pointed that the health benefits accruing to a community increase significantly, when the last mile gap is filled – i.e. when even the last few daefecating in the open stop doing that. This is understandable logically, since shit of even few persons – even one person for that matter – is enough to pollute the water source and put the health of community at risk. The programme was posed akin to polio eradication mantra – एक भी बच्चा छूट गया, तो समझो चक्र टूट गया ( ‘even if one child is left out from vaccination, the entire cycle will break’).
Experience shows that whenever an exception is allowed in a programme, it is misused. Prior to emphasis on ODF, it was common to label sanitation coverages ranging from say 50% to 90% as ‘near ODF’. This gave a false complacent picture of having achieved something that was not.
It was important to bring in the concept that there was no ‘near ODF’. ODF was a zero-sum concept: either a village was ODF or it was not.
Even a 99% toilet coverage was not ODF. This was especially important, since the last few that remain in the village without a toilet may be the poor and vulnerable ones – and any concept short of a 100% achievement carries a risk of their perpetual exclusion.
There was a practical and administrative reason too in making shift from individual approach to collective approach. In order to increase the buy-in of this concept, the States and districts were suggested that even from achievement and monitoring point of view, it might be easier to target achievement of ODF villages, rather than number of toilets. A Collector might be more comfortable – and clear in his goal – if the goal is achievement of say, a thousand ODF villages, than achievement (read construction!) of say two lakh toilets!
The ODF process was much faster, since once a village got motivated to stop open daefecation, it could do so within a matter of few months by bringing in their collective energies. In this process, they would also find local innovative solutions to any problems that may arise – for e.g. the village would collectively construct toilet for those who were poor and whose names did not figure as eligible for the government incentive; or they would even construct a community toilet on their own, to take care of visitors to the village ( say, during a marriage ceremony etc.) On the other hand, in the toilet approach, the focus on individual toilets strengthened the linkage between individual toilet and subsidy, and broke the collective initiative, thereby delaying the process inordinately. Javed, nodal officer, sanitation, Bihar seemed to have understood it well, when he said : ‘ ओ॰डी॰एफ़॰ के पीछे जाएँगे तो टॉलेट अपने आप बन जाएँगे; टॉलेट के पीछे जाएँगे तो कभी ओ॰डी॰एफ़॰ नहीं हो पाएँगे ! (If we go after ODF, toilets will automatically get constructed; if we go after toilets, ODF will never be achieved).
Most importantly, the shift of focus from individual toilet to ODF signified U-turn in the approach towards sanitation. The toilet approach looked at toilet as an individual good – a ‘welfare material’, to be provided to beneficiaries. The ODF approach looked at efforts to trigger behavioural change in the community, so that they collectively resolve to stop open daefecation, and take action upon it by constructing toilets for themselves.
The toilet approach presumed people to be passive recipients of welfare, incapable of thinking for themselves, and incapable of solving their problems on their own. The ODF approach looked at people as partners in development, capable and efficient in addressing their own issues, once they have been suitably sensitized for that. The toilet approach included component of IEC (Information, Education and Communication) to convince the person to use a toilet after that has been constructed.
The ODF approach believed in ‘triggering’ behavioural change in the community by invoking collective introspection by the community before they took up construction of toilets. The difference in this timing of behavioural change – before or after construction of toilet was critical and was well brought out in many training workshops by Shri J P Shukla, master facilittor of community approaches through his inimitable simile : दूध से दही बन सकता है, लेकिन क्या दही से दूध बन सकता है ? (It is possible to make curd from milk, but not vice versa), signifying that behaviour change is unlikely to happen later if the person is not part of the decision of toilet construction in the first place. In the toilet approach, since behaviour change did not necessarily precede toilet construction, the chances of usage of toilet dropped significantly. On the other hand, in the ODF approach, since the decision of toilet construction lay with the people, the chances of usage increased considerably.
A study showed that the likelihood of a person using a toilet that he has constructed of his own volition is twice more than that of a toilet provided by the government. The toilet approach presumed that gradual increase in number of individual toilets in a village would lead to achievement of complete freedom from open daefecation for the village. In this approach, ODF was considered, a continuum of increase in toilet coverage, till the time it became 100% – termed ‘village saturation’. ODF however, comprised a basic change of approach and was much beyond gradual increase in number of toilets to 100%.
Also, since people were themselves involved in making their village ODF, the process was much more sustainable. Having made efforts to stop the practice, people were not likely to again allow the practice of open daefecation to creep in. For this, they would themselves put in local level mechanisms.
A district in Chhattisgarh started a secret poll by children to record names of those going out in the open, even after the village was declared ODF. These people would then be confronted publicly in front of the entire village! This was done sensitively, and the involvement of children ensured that the emotional hurt was minimal. The idea was not condemnation, but reform. In contrast, the toilet approach cast a perpetual dependence on the government for toilets. Indeed, in Nadia district of West Bengal, declared ODF, the people who had functional older toilets built under the earlier scheme TSC, grudged against their neighbors who had been provided newer Swachh Bharat toilets! The district, in fact had prepared a plan for fund requirement for upgrading the earlier built toilets!
The toilet approach was out of sync with the basic fact that sanitation is a collective public good. The toilet approach created an anomaly, since those people in the village, who already had toilets, did not consider sanitation to be their problem. A sarpanch of a village in Uttarakhand felt that his village was good in sanitation since most of the people in his village had toilets. When the matter was discussed further and we went to see the place(s) where the few who did not have toilets daefecated, it was found that some daefecated not too far from his house. His own servant mentioned that he would sometimes sit right behind the temple, not too far from the sarpanch’s residence. Temple! I was surprised. To which he remarked, ‘ जब पेट में लगी होती है, तो भगवान किस को याद आता है! ( When one is having pressure to relieve oneself, who remembers God!) The sarpanch, seeing this, would surely have revised his opinion on his village being clean, and would have perhaps, felt urgency to do something about it. The ODF approach hammers this point right upfront that it is not a question about the number of toilets in a village; it is about absence of shit in the village.
– originally written in 2016.
