Oh Crap! Where’s the One Potty Per Household Project?
[Editor’s Note: Last week, I spent a few hours with the Arghyam management team – Sunita Nadhamuni (CEO) and Vijay Krishna (Director, R&D and head of India Water Portal (one of Arghyam’s key offerings)). Arghyam is an Indian public charitable foundation setup with an endowment from Rohini Nilekani, working in the water and sanitation sector since 2005. Sunita, Vijay and I are collaborators and friends from Silicon Valley during our Rejuvenate India Movement days (circa 1999-2003). This is the first of a multi-part series on Arghyam focusing on ASHWAS. The acronym ASHWAS, which expands to A Survey of Household Water and Sanitation, refers to a participatory survey that covers 28 districts of Karnataka spanning 17,200 households across 172 gram panchayats (GPs) – the only Karnataka district excluded in this study is Bangalore Urban.]

Late last year, the big story making the rounds was that India had more mobile phones than toilets. This was news to everyone except Indians. Then I read somewhere that the Government of India is allegedly spending $350 million a year to build toilets in rural areas. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement, estimates that India needs about 120 million more latrines. Atanu Dey, economist and author who blogs at Deesha.org, had the following pithy comment on one of his 2004 posts:
Sanitation and clean drinking water are problems that are real and will have a greater impact on the lives of people in urban and rural India than giving them access to information and installing internet kiosks. If you provide them with just those two, you would improve their lives much more and they will suffer much less from diseases. A glass of clean drinking water will help them more than information on the internet about health. A decent place to crap in would help the women in urban and rural areas more than surfing the world wide web.

Clean drinking water and sanitation are inextricably linked at the hip in most parts of India (rural and urban). The India-level statistics and narrative on clean drinking water and sanitation are scary. Zooming into the statistics for just one state (done by Arghyam via the ASHWAS study), is orders of magnitude more sobering. Arghyam describes the survey as different from conventional surveys in that:
- it is a citizen’s survey in that it places a high premium on the perceptions of the citizens of rural Karnataka.
- an important objective is to go beyond mere extraction of information to the development of a layered analytical process to assess the water, sanitation and hygiene situation at gram panchayat (GP), district and state levels.
Key ASHWAS Findings (Text Version)
(For the graphical version, scroll down just a wee bit.)
- SANITATION
- 72% of the people defecate in the open with the figure being as high as 98% in Raichur district.
- Only 50% of respondents claim to use soap while washing their hands after defecation.
- Many village maps show open defecation areas dangerously close to drinking water sources.
- 80% of those who practice open defecation say they find it inconvenient.
- Lack of finance is stated as the primary reason for not building toilets.
- 82% of Gram Panchayats reported presence of toilets in all schools but ASHWAS surveyors observed that most toilets are defunct.
- Only 50% of Panchayats reported the presence of toilets in all anganwadis (government-sponsored child-care centers).
- Only 42% of households have access to drains in front of their houses, and 50% of drains are not cleaned for 6 months or longer.
- WATER
- 87% of households depend on groundwater.
- 60% of sources tested exceeded 1 ppm (Bureau of Indian Standards norm on permissible fluoride), 20% of sources tested positive for nitrate contamination, while 38% had bacteriological contamination.
- In terms of time taken to collect water, 41% of households take between 30 and 60 minutes per day.
Key ASHWAS Findings (Graphical Version)










Comments
6 Comments
Very interesting post. I wonder if there can be a low cost model to building cheap, self-sustaining healthy toilets. For e.g something like a sulabh, for e.g where families can pay a monthly rent of 50 rs and use it as much as they can. I am not sure if one can expect (realistically) from Govt to build 120 million toilets and sustain them. Most of them will be in the state of defunct!
There’s at least one player trying to innovate in this space: @ThePottyProject on Twitter (Delhi-based folks). They also have a very interesting blog here:
http://pottyprojectindia.tumblr.com/page/2
They’re on my pipeline of folks to interview and write about.
One common theme I see across multiple sectors is “off-grid”/decentralization: off-grid energy (solar, husk & wind), water (rainwater harvesting/self-sustaining), sanitary napkins (e.g. Jayashree Industries for sanitary napkins). So me thinks an off-grid potty also possible?
hey Pravesh,
I had replied to your comment on 6/19 but due to a (still
unresolved) WordPress/Disqus issue, it didn’t show up on the public
site. Shows up fine on my WordPress admin console. Resposting my reply
below:
—-
There’s at least one player trying to innovate in this space:
@ThePottyProject on Twitter (Delhi-based folks). They also have a very
interesting blog here:
http://pottyprojectindia.tumblr.com/page/2
They’re on my pipeline of folks to interview and write about.
One common theme I see across multiple sectors is
“off-gridâ€/decentralization: off-grid energy (solar, husk & wind),
water (rainwater harvesting/self-sustaining), sanitary napkins (e.g.
Jayashree Industries for sanitary napkins). So me thinks an off-grid
potty also possible?
—-
Â
In my opinion lack of infra is not just about investment or spending. There is serious problem of mindset.
 I could see beautiful pay and use toilets constructed by Infosys Foundation ( I think) spending crores is going down toilet and people continue to dirty surrounding area of toilet.
One such toilet is near Maruthi Seva nagar, Bangalore. I haven’t seen it being utilised properly even for few months.  Now all its fixtures are stripped one by one and only walls remain. I don’t know what is causing this but if some one thinks that just by spending money they will solve problem then are making mistake.
In contrast if we go to chickpet/ cotten pet there are some public urinals which consist of only walls, stinks like hell but one can always find a cue of more then 30-40 people.Â
In second case people who been to chickpet realise that these people are not different then other parts( I find them to be even less civilized) then why such discipline?Â
I guess answer is they are forced to use even stinking toilets as there are no walls or corners open in over crowded and narrow by lanes of chickpet.Â
I think we should look for some urinals like http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/street-urinal-makes-public-peeing-practical/ with some improvisation.
Thanks for your comment, Girish. You are absolutely right about the mindset problem. On a broader level (i.e. not just public urinals), we Indians don’t have a strong sense of community ownership for ‘shared spaces’ (roads, sidewalks, parks, etc). Community (for majority of Indians) = me & my immediate family. Against this backdrop, I’ve been watching the early progress of http://theuglyindian.com with a great deal of interest. Check them out.
Thanks for the Wired story link. Considering it’s been 2 yrs since the introduction, we should probably know by now whether it worked or not. Will post to Twitter and find out 🙂
hey Girish,
I had replied to your comment on 6/19 but due to a (still unresolved) WordPress/Disqus issue, it didn’t show up on the public site. Shows up fine on my WordPress admin console. Resposting my reply below:
—-
Thanks for your comment, Girish. You are absolutely right about the
mindset problem. On a broader level (i.e. not just public urinals), we
Indians don’t have a strong sense of community ownership for ‘shared
spaces’ (roads, sidewalks, parks, etc). Community (for majority of
Indians) = me & my immediate family. Against this backdrop, I’ve
been watching the early progress of http://theuglyindian.com with a great deal of interest. Check them out.
Thanks for the Wired story link. Considering it’s been 2 yrs since
the introduction, we should probably know by now whether it worked or
not. Will post to Twitter and find out
—-
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