Tackling the Toilet Taboo

When you wake up every morning and have a toilet to use, you should feel lucky. Four out of ten people in the world have no access to toilets. Every twenty seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. Six out of ten girls drop out from schools on reaching puberty because of lack of water. Toilets, sanitation, sanitary napkins, open defecation - these are not things we like to talk about. But it’s about time we did.

With a percussionist drumming on toilet seats, the rhythmic beat at the last year’s inaugural conference of the World Toilet Association (WTA) seemed to tuck away the cultural taboos surrounding the embarrassing act of defecation. And the UN General Assembly declaring the year 2008 the ‘International Year of Sanitation’ fuelled the restroom revolution. The figures are staggering. 2.6 billion people in the world have no access to toilets and 2.2 billion people die annually from diarrhoea. "When around 4,000 children die each day because they do not have access to these basic services, which we take for granted, something is terribly wrong," said Vanessa J. Tobin of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Sanitation is not just a good idea, it's a great investment. But, the people believe that a mobile phone is a necessity, and sanitation a non-priority. If the government really wants to do something for the poor, it might as well spend on food, health, education or even roads. Why sanitation? This is the common argument used by the families living below the poverty line, who don’t want to ‘waste’ money on building a toilet. It is estimated that the cost of meeting the target of reducing by half the proportion of people without basic sanitation is about 10 billion US$ per year, from now until 2015. Dr. Shiggeru Omi of World Health Organisation (WHO) says that it isn’t as expensive as it seems. “This sum may seem a lot, but if we reflect we realise that this amount is less than one percent of world military spending in 2005; one-third of the estimated global spending on bottled water, or as much as Europeans spend on ice-creams each year!’’ "Globally, if universal sanitation were achieved by 2015, it would cost $95 billion, but it would save $660 billion," writes Rose George in her newly released book "The Big Necessity." Now this is something that should feature in every Government’s smart saving strategies.

Half of India defecates in the open. The government’s far-fetched dream is to get all these 600 million people to start using toilets by 2012. That seems like a lot of toilets to build in less than four years. But, Kurukshetra district in Haryana has proven a point - providing clean sanitation to everyone is not an impossible task. In this district, a landless labourer’s pride is the outdoor toilet. They have no money to build a door. A jute curtain or a plastic sheet does the job. But they have a constant source of water. So the toilet remains hygienic and there is no stench. The design is a simple one, easy to maintain, with a soak pit that will not pollute the water table.

The women in the Bishangarh village, who are part of the Nigrani (vigilance) Samitis, go around with torches, sticks and whistles early in the morning. If they catch anyone defecating in the open, they blow the whistle and shine the torch on the crouching figure. This embarrasses the villagers to the point that they will not repeat it. No wonder, Bishangarh has received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, the prize instituted by the central government in recognition of villages that are free of open defecation. West Bengal is also taking the lead in initiating sanitation drives in its villages and is targeted to become the first State in the country to achieve total sanitation by 2012. The State already has 76 per cent households covered, as against 27 per cent in 2001 when the sanitation drive began. Over 90 per cent schools have sanitation and 94 per cent have safe water supply.

While we deal with the problems regarding sanitation, eco-sanitation creeps in. It is the problem of dealing efficiently and ecologically with sewer systems, wastewater, treatment and purification, which is no less serious. In the UK alone, the sewage system emits some 28.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. In practice, ecological sanitation includes options such as flush-free (and odour-free) urinals, separation toilets for urine and faeces, dry and composting toilets, dehydration devices for composting of faeces, use of faeces or excreta for the generation of biogas, vacuum sewers and flush systems operating on minimal amounts of water etc. As sewers become overloaded with urban development, drought strikes various regions of the earth, and potable water becomes increasingly scarce, even the flush toilet is now put into question.

Sanitation solutions brought with them challenges like failing water resources, rapid urbanisation and population increases. "Approximately 1.7 billion people, one-third of the world's population, presently live in countries that are water-stressed. This number is projected to increase to about five billion by 2025, depending on the rate of population growth. Projected climate change could further decrease streamflow and groundwater recharge" warned Tobin of the WTA. The solution may lie with the Global Dry Toilet Association, which aims at making dry toilets an essential part of sustainable development, thus securing clean waters and a healthy environment for future generations. They intend to introduce dry toilets together with controlled management of toilet waste and also aim at making people aware of the benefits of dry sanitation. But before all this action takes place, the fundamental problem of providing basic sanitation has to be dealt with.

For us, the rare occasion of using a public toilet seems irksome and sometimes, even disgusting. For someone else, using a toilet signifies health and dignity. Let us not flush and forget.