India sets target to build 5.2 million toilets in rural areas by end of August

India’s Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation has set an ambitious target of building 5.2 million toilets across rural India by the end of August this year, after a request from the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led union government, which has previously affirmed its commitment to improving sanitation in India.

Speaking at a function in Delhi last October Narendra Modi, BJP’s leader and now prime minister of India, had famously said that India needed to build toilets first and temples later.

The latest drive to build toilets, announced on 4 July under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan national sanitation programme, is an attempt to solve the pernicious problem of open defecation in India. Over 60% of Indians do not use toilets and defecate instead in fields, open drains, and other public places, causing contamination of food and water and related health problems. A 2013 World Bank report[1] showed that rural Indian children were shorter, on average, than rural African children and that almost all of the difference could be attributed to malnourishment caused by open defecation.

Despite this, the Indian government has traditionally allocated very few funds to sanitation, said Rajesh Pai, the director of planning and infrastructure at the Consortium for DEWATS Dissemination Society, a non-governmental organisation working on sanitation in India. “That’s why this development is very encouraging,” he said.

However, Pai and other sanitation experts were sceptical about the effects of the current drive because most rural Indians did not recognise the need for sanitation and tended not to use toilets even if they were available.

Last month a team of researchers from the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics conducted a survey in five Indian states and found that over 40% of respondents who had access to government approved toilets did not use them. They believed that open defecation was more wholesome and preferred it to using the small, enclosed latrines built under government sponsored drives. The researchers concluded that the construction of government latrines would not eliminate open defecation unless it was accompanied by an awareness campaign.

Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan has set aside 15% of its Rs4260 crore (£414m; €523m; $708m) annual budget to educate people about sanitation. However, Sangita Vyas, the lead researcher from the Research Institute of Compassionate Economics team, said that only about 4-5% of this allocation was spent last year, which she argued was not enough. “We need to have the best marketing experts, psychologists, and behavioural economists to come up with ways to get people to use latrines. There is no silver bullet, but one thing is for sure: the government should be spending more money on information, education, and communication,” she said.

Furthermore, the hurried deadline of 31 August might interfere with the proper execution of the programme, Pai noted. “It should be done in a programmed, rather than an ad hoc fashion,” he said, or adoption would be poor.

During the 2004 tsunami that caused destruction across the east coast of India several organisations, including Pai’s, constructed thousands of toilets for affected households. However, most families ended up converting the toilets into storage or prayer rooms because they thought that toilets inside homes would be unhygienic.

So far the pace of building toilets has been very slow, said a circular published this week on the ministry’s website; but Sujoy Majumdar, the director of Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, said that it would pick up. Targets given to various states were higher than the total construction goal set by the government, he added, but he refused to say how much lower than 5.2 million the actual goal was.