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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-07-31
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V35Vw29tay0
India has a lot to be proud of democratic tradition its diverse of the its contributions in art architecture and science and yoga but images like this one neat India's reputation so why is this image associated with India well if this circle represents all of the open defecation happens in the world this is the fraction that happens in India and this is the fraction that happens only
in rural India sixty five percent of rule Indians defecate in the open so what that means is that most of the open defecation that happens in the world happens in rural India and most rural Indians defecate in the open every day five hundred million people in villages in India go in the fields rather than use the toilet or latrine that's bigger than the population of the
United States and this is a really important issue because open defecation is really bad for child health every year hundreds of thousands of children die in India because of exposure to the bacteria and feces and those that survive are physically and cognitively stunted because of that exposure this lives with them for the rest of their lives so why do so many people in India defecate in
the open if it's such a bad problem if it's so widespread and it's so poor for child health why does it persists ask a question that my colleagues and I thought to answer when we started our squat survey two years ago a survey and sanitation quality use access and threatens so if you may be thinking that well India support country and you know maybe people in
India just can't afford to build latrines I visited a village and with a protest last December and I was walking around the village looking for a household that had a latrine so I was wondering all throughout the village and I just couldn't find anyone that had a latrine until I and I entered one hamlet nice all these covered pit all over the place I got excited
because latrines have pets and I thought that these were latrines until I started talking to someone who lives there so I approached a man and I asked him whether he had a latrine he said he did it I was a little puzzled and I asked him well if you don't have a latrine then what are you using this pit right here that's in front of your
house for he said that he and his family had built this pit so that the water that they use for dish washing and clothes washing in paving could just flow into the pit and soak into the ground rather than going into the streets and making the village very this household could have definitely afforded to build a latrine a latrine just has a pit with a slap
in a seat on top of it they had built most of that infrastructure already they just didn't prioritize one and in fact many households in rural India don't prioritize having a latrine so let's compare India to some other countries in the world on the vertical axis of this graph we have the rate of open defecation in the country and on the horizontal axis we have GDP
per capita each circle on this graph represents a country and the size of the circle represents the size of the population so there's a trend line here which means that richer countries tend to have a lot lower rates of open defecation than poorer countries do but India is really far from not try online India's an out liar of the fifty five countries that are poorer than
India on this graph forty six of them have a lower rate of open defecation and these are countries that are poorer than India so let's take Bangladesh as an example follow this house the GDP per capita of less than one half of India's but in Bangladesh only four percent of households defecate in the open while in India fifty three percent to the other reason why income
doesn't really explain open defecation in India very well is because simple latrines that safely confined feces on the ground are actually very inexpensive so in Bangladesh will commonly find latrines that look like this and many people use latrines like us all over the country and these latrines cost about fifty dollars or three thousand MPs in Kenya people commonly use latrines that look like this miss costs
even less than fifty dollars these latrines are incredibly simple they have a pit which is about fifty cubic feet or a cylinder in the ground about three feet by six feet deep and on top of that there's a slab with the seat and it every five years or so these pets have to be emptied and in pretty much every developing country in the world where latrines
like this are used their anti by hand so the WHL recommends the use of latrines like this because they reduce the amount of germs in the environment and in most developing countries latrines like this are commonly found all over the place except in India in India it's more common to find latrines that hot pics that look like this and I can promise you my colleague Nick
hill is not a short man no no no I meant this household in Gujarat last year and we asked them why they were building a pit this large they were in the process of constructing it this household told us that they wanted to build a pit that would last them a generation I ask them why do you need to pick that lasts a generation I mean
can't you just build something that's smaller and cheaper and anti it out periodically they were completely astonished at this question how could they anti a latrine pit by hand if they did so they wouldn't be able to go to the temple they wouldn't be able to perform their rituals they would be completely ostracized from their society that's why they wanted to build a pit this big
and this household isn't unique in feeling that way in fact many households in rural India feel the same way and wild leave WHL recommends pits of about fifty cubic feet in size what we found in the squad surveys that people tend to build pets that are five times the recommended W. H. O. pit size and when we ask households what they would ideally like to build
they told us that they wanted to build picks but were twenty times that side and you can imagine picks best large are quite expensive to build so latrines that people use in India are much more expensive than the kinds of latrines that are commonly used and most other developing countries in the world so what's the big deal with emptying a pit latrine I mean in pretty
much most other countries in the world while attending a pit latrine by hand isn't the most fun thing to do people still do it but here in India handling feces carries a stigma India is unique from other developing countries in the world because of its history of cast I'm sure most of you in this room go light cast you are while the inclusive cast is slowly
declining in India most people in India are still very conscious of it and unfortunately most people still think that higher caste people are more pure than lower caste people cast has a lot to do with sanitation because people from the lowest castes have been historically responsible for doing manual scavenging or the daily cleaning up he sees from dry toilets by hand we heard a lot about
manual scavenging earlier this morning from Mr shape people from the lowest castes are considered permanently polluted and because cast is still so important in India Indian society even today people from the lowest caster often very socially marginalized and a price people from higher costs try to often avoid contact with people from lower castes and their work because they believe if they come into contact with them
they will also become polluted so this is a lot to do with latrine use in India because people associate and seeing a pit latrine with manual scavenging what that means is that people from middle and upper caste would find it inconceivable two ND a pit latrine by hand them selves at the same time people from lower castes tend to avoid doing such work understandably because it's
associated with their past and continuing oppression so the market for pit and seeing in India has completely broken down and that's why people want huge pit so while many rural Indians think of death when they think of using a latrine many people think open defecation looks like this no I visited it retired army officer in Haryana last year and he had a big family has four
sons and their wives and children all lived within this family had a latrine and it had a very large pit they have probably spent sixty thousand reviews are thousand dollars on building the switching only the children use the slow train everyone else in the family won in the open even the young daughters in law I ask this retired army officer why do you go in the
open instead of using your very nice latrine that you have right here at home and he told me that going in the open allows him to exercise his body it allows him to get the impurities out and in fact if he used a latrine he probably wouldn't live as long that's why people in cities only live to sixty or seventy years while people in villages live
for a hundred years so this gentlemen thought the defecating in the open was actually better for health than using a latrine and what we found in the squad surveys that many households feel about ways in fact most people who defecate and open the way you talk to in our squad survey thought that going in the open was just as good for child health is using a
latrine but let's remember here even though we may imagine this beautiful field when I when we think of defecating in the open going in the open is really bad for child health and killed hundreds of thousands of children each year in India who's working on this issue we heard just earlier about gone because and fortunately we also don't have to prove to the government that sanitation
it is a worthy topic to be working on in fact the government has been building latrines in India for the past fifteen years now but many of these latrines are a are the kinds of which means that the W. H. O. promotes so it's really no wonder that many of them end up looking like this they're used for storerooms there left to become dilapidated so if
constructing toilets isn't going to work what can we do what can the government do what can you and I do you know I get this question all the time and I really wish that I had a good answer one thing that we could do is just wait wait for rural Indians to get rich enough to build the kinds of latrines that how big pit but I
don't think we want to wait that long I don't think we want to lose that many children to open defecation what we need to do is start having a Frank conversations about cast and about what cast has to do with sanitation and we need to be experimenting like crazy with solutions that address people's real concerns about pit anti you know you and I and other elite
Indians who live in cities we got to avoid talking about past an open defecation because they're messy and uncomfortable topics but India's growing children don't have that same luxury of avoiding the germs death and disease spread by open defecation if we care about giving these children a chance to live a happy long and healthy life we need to start having those conversations right now thank you
