47. Converting shame into subjectivity

It isn't a good news that the much hyped Swachh Bharat Mission has not made significant dent, as of now, on transforming peoples' habit of easing themselves in the open. Recent surveys have shown that a toilet doesn't ensure its usage, reaffirming what V S Naipaul propounded decades ago that people prefer open defecation to avoid the fear of claustrophobia within a closet. As habits die hard, we are literally back to where it all started. Building toilets and making people use it are two different things. 

Unlike many of you, I'm getting convinced that we may have run out of ideas for now to get everyone to shit inside a toilet. The sheer number of toilets required for the country to attain some level of decency would be in the range of some 350 million, assuming that a family of five takes turn to use the same loo. The number will continue to grow - as population grows exponentially, as families break into smaller units, and as households migrate. Even a full-time Toilet Ministry will feel fully stretched to keep pace.

But why are we stuck to toilet as the only option, the absence of which favours the foreign tourists with some stinking photo opportunity? Unlike the west, toilets for a vast majority that survives on less than $2 a day may not be a good idea. For them, easing in public seems a democratic decree. It has worked thus far, and may sustain during our lifetime. Because public empathy towards squatting has remained secular, never did it trigger any class or caste strife in matter of appropriating public space for conducting private action. 

Shit in itself may not be a problem. Left on its own, it engages millions of microbes in enriching the soil with much needed organic carbon. We all know fixing carbon is a climate friendly activity. But the moment it comes in contact with water, something that a toilet facilitates, the trouble starts. Each water body, be it a pond or a river, gets an undesired share of floating excreta at various stages of decomposition which proves fatal to some half a million children below the age of five on account of water-borne diseases. 

With its extensive paraphernalia the toilet makes unreasonable demand on increasingly scarce public resource - water, which limits toilet usage alongside amplifying the water crises. I would imagine that the solution to country's sanitation enigma may rest in recognizing existing 'informal squatter islands' as permanent municipal spaces where individual waste will get managed in a way that produces subjectivity than shame. The role of municipality would then be limited to aesthetically managing such islands, upturning the soil periodically and getting it ready for next volume of bowel discharge before such squatter islands are turned into public parks or sold at a premium to the real estate builders. 

It has worked this way so far, but not in an institutionally organized manner. I think we need to be firm on how we wish to tackle the crises ingeniously. If there could be `nude beaches' elsewhere in the west, can't we persist with such `butt parks' till the offenders take a call to mend their habit.