No need to fight: Jairam, Modi both right about toilets

Both Jairam Ramesh and Narendra Modi are right about the toilets. Ramesh explained the relevance of toilets when he said, a year ago in Wardha, that toilets were more important than temples. Modi, speaking in Delhi yesterday, said he’d rather first build toilets than temples. He was prioritising one above the other. And yet, and unsurprisingly, the whole thing is now caught up in a war of words. That’s the way of public discourse these days, regardless of the issues. Let’s go back to about a year ago. Jairam Ramesh was clear. There were so few toilets that they needed to be on top of agenda, for it involved personal hygiene and public health. Because he put it ahead of temples, he received the flak from the right-wingers. [caption id=“attachment_1152055” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A portable toilet set up outside the Commonwealth Games Village in New Delhi. Reuters[/caption] Ramesh recalled on CNN-IBN how he was attacked. Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP he said accused him of tearing the ‘fine fabric between religion and faith’. Apparently, it seemed because, temple as a proxy for religious fundamentalism, was the BJP’s agenda. Now suddenly, the BJP having to explain Modi’s assertion which ran contrary, as he himself said, to “my image of a Hindutvawadi”, has said, via its spokesperson Nirmala Seetharaman, that emphasis on toilets was part of the party’s development outlook. Modi, after all, is the only development man. Not unsurprisingly, Digvijaya Singh pitched in with his shovelful of wisdom. So, had Modi ever experienced the joy or satisfaction of cleaning a toilet? So, what was Modi talking about, he asked, making us all wonder if he had a context? Someone, one often feels, should clean up after Singh, but that would contravene a new law which once again outlaws manual scavenging. Talking of choices between temples and toilets, when small cubicles were built to locate toilets in the post-Latur earthquake rehabilitation programme, many homes preferred to put it to a different use: as pooja rooms. About 40 percent of toilets were being put to “other uses”. The issue of toilets would soon get stuck in a Punch and Judy show and get left behind as the attention-deficit public moves on to another television whipped controversy limited to what one said and what another countered it with. It would be like someone who uses a loo and leaves without flushing it. That is sad, though such articulated policies have only left behind a lot of stink and no deodorants by way of concrete policy decisions on this issue. The country needs not just toilets but its proper use. But probably, it has to be their provision before proper use. But toilets have never been high on any developing or under-developed country’s agenda. In March this year, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson had said that lack of toilets was a global crisis about which people “don’t like to talk about.” The United Nations was trying, Eliason had said, to reduce by half the number of persons without access to a toilet by 2015 and eliminate open defecation by 2025. In India, it could be a tall order. The global statistics: six billion of the seven billion people in the world have access to mobiles, only 4.5 billion have access to toilets - that is about 63 per cent. In India, the proportion is reversed. Only a third of the people have that facility. The widespread absence of toilets explains the lack of understanding of its use. They become a part of cultural practices. China recently issued an advisory to its people traveling overseas that they ought to be sitting on a toilet seat than squatting on its edges. It led to an adverse image of the country. Like them, we would know how to use them if we have them. But there are states where toilets are a scandal, not in just the manner of their use when available but of them going missing. Firstpost had written how of the 6.06 million toilets claimed as built, 3.1 million were missing. So, toilets are another scam material. Urban India probably has higher access, one assumes, to toilets than rural areas do, but look at the kind of toilets or the way we use them: we lack aim, especially in public toilets and leave it stinking. Women dread using them fearing urinary infections. In rural areas, and in urban slums, it is not unusual at all to see people leaving for the fields before dawn with cans of water in hand. And wherever there are public toilets, rural or urban, the insufficient supply of water makes it a scandal, a lost investment in an important resource. In such a situation of policies which get caught up only in a wrap of hot – and should we say stinking – air, what does one say? Probably, holy s***!?