Toilet technology must improve to cope with growing demand and worsening water shortages
TO STROLL AT dawn through most inhabited parts of the Indian countryside—or even to land at many provincial airports—used to be to intrude on a vast latrine. In every secluded and not-so-secluded corner, men could be seen squatting, to defecate. In 2014 India led the world in “open defecation”, with an estimated 600m of the 1bn people in the world reliant on the practice. It is an extremely dangerous one.
In theory, this should be one of the more attainable SDGs. The World Bank has sought to cost the water and sanitation ones, and estimated it would take $114bn a year to achieve them, of which 69% would be spent on sanitation. The total would amount to just 0.39% of the GDPs of the 140 countries the World Bank studied. That would, however, be 0.27 percentage points more than is currently spent globally. It would require a massive reallocation of resources.
“Success” was preordained. A calendar for 2019 printed long in advance by the government’s swachh bharat campaign marks the month of October with a cartoon of a rocket soaring upwards against a background of graph paper, and crossing 100%, to signify the achievement of total ODF. Of course this is nonsense. Nobody seriously believes open defecation has ended altogether in India.
But it would be utterly unfair to dismiss altogether the Indian government’s efforts. NGOs acknowledge that huge progress has been made. Mr Modi boasts of having built 110m toilets for 600m people in just five years. And by talking about the importance of the issue in his very first National Day speech from the Red Fort in Delhi in 2014, he may have helped change attitudes.
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