Nature’s Call!

Written by Sara Iqbal • February 2011

Each day, Indian villagers leave behind an estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement in the open fields, alongside river banks used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians. Men, children and even women can be seen searching for a secluded place, away from leering men and stick-led animals, with the sun rising in plain view. Ironically, earlier last year, a UN study found far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet!

In the shadow of its torrid growth, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency. From the various streams across the country to the nation’s holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of India’s surface water is contaminated by the human waste, besides industrial effluent, according to the Indian Ministry of Urban Development.

Although the practice of open defecation declined in South Asia from 65% to 48% between 1990 and 2006, some 778 million people still rely on this risky sanitation practice in the region where the largest numbers of people from South Asia practicing open defecation are found in India (665 million), Pakistan (50 million), Bangladesh (18 million) and Nepal (14 million).

Safe water supply and sanitation practices are one of the Millennium Developmental Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations. They are also crucial for better health indicators and indicate towards a better provision of basic social necessities. Looking at these statistics however, one can easily assume the risks involved. First and foremost is the health risk that open defecation poses, especially to women and children.

Open defecation or OD causes water contamination and gastrointestinal diseases. Relieving themselves in open, besides rivers and open fields, “open defecators” are unaware of the cyclic process that their waste travels in and comes back to them. When it rains, these indiscriminate human wastes are washed into our water bodies which are the main source of drinking water for both human and livestock. This inevitably leads to the outbreak of cholera, diarrhea and other perilous diseases.

Apart from health and environmental crisis, poor sanitation and open defecation leaves a very unpleasant impression on tourists visiting a country and leaves behind a trail of bad odor and uneasiness.

Governments in South Asia need to take urgent steps to nip open defecation in the bud. They must enforce existing sanitation laws and should make it mandatory that all compound houses and other abodes have decent toilet facilities. The governments, with participation from NGOs and international donors must also vehemently work towards running major national public campaigns against open defecation and promotion of good sanitation.

There is also a need to build more public toilets in respective countries of the region, renovate existing public toilet facilities in deplorable states, construction of new and modern public toilet facilities to consolidate the older ones, and make public latrine free of charge and accessible at all times.

Apart from institutional change, it is also important that an attitude change is brought about in the masses across the region. There is a need to make people across the rural and lower urban communities of South Asia realize the health hazards that OD causes, promoting in them a sense of civic and collective responsibility towards a pollution free, viable environment, at the same time discouraging them from openly defecating by instilling in them a sense of shame and disgust at community level.