The Hindu Roots of India’s Public Defecation Problem

If you are someone that has navigated the internet, there is surely no way you would’ve missed all the memes, generated from every corner of the world, about India’s persistent open defecation problem. In fact, some years back (around 2014), UNICEF had even launched an official campaign due to this huge mess, calling it “Take the Poo to the Loo.” Here’s the description from the online campaign page:

Close to 594 million which is 48 per cent of population in India practices open defecation. That’s half the population dumping over 65 million kilos of poo out there every day.

 

If this poo continues to be let loose on us, there will be no escaping the stench of life threatening infections, diseases and epidemics. Think about it. Half the population doesn’t use a toilet while the other half of the population accepts it. We simply accept India as it is. We are part of the issue, part of the acceptance.

 

So, if you give a shit about this issue, then don’t just scrunch up your nose and walk away.

 

Join the ‘Take Poo to the Loo’ campaign and pledge your support to a poo-free nation.

 

• Globally, India has the largest number of people, close to 594 million which is 48 percent of population in India practices open defecation. About half the population of India use toilets.

• With 44 per cent of mothers disposing their children’s faeces in the open, there is a very high risk of microbial contamination (bacteria, viruses, amoeba) of water which causes diarrhea in children.

• Children weakened by frequent diarrhea episodes are more vulnerable to malnutrition, stunting, and opportunistic infections such as pneumonia. About 48 per cent of children in India are suffering from some degree of malnutrition. Diarrhea and worm infection are two major health conditions that affect school age children impacting their learning abilities.

• Although access to sanitation in rural India is improving, the increase is not equitable. Open defecation is still almost universal among the poorest 20 per cent of the population.

• Women and girls face shame and a loss of personal dignity and safety risk if there is no toilet at home. They have to wait for the night to relieve themselves to avoid being seen by others.

• A very low proportion of the rural population in India uses improved sanitation (facilities which ensure hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact).

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This social media campaign by UNICEF ended up prompting Indian officials to take action, including Narendra Modi of the BJP, the country’s PM since 2014. Modi is, of course, a Hindu cultural nationalist who would want more than anything to not see India being projected globally as a superPOOPER rather than a superPOWER.

As such, he launched the “Swachh Bharat” or “Clean India” campaign in October 2014, just a few months after having been elected as the new PM, and, initially, it was somewhat successful. Many toilets were built, particularly in rural India, where open defecation was a way of life for its people.

Analysts had believed that these very serious sanitation issues would subsequently be resolved. This was, of course, because it was assumed that the reasons behind the situation were socioeconomic in nature, that is, like in much of the Third World, people only chose to practice open defecation due to the lack of access to proper toilet facilities.

Yet, as a recent World Bank research paper demonstrated that the “Clean India” campaign has failed (provoking the Modi government to try and censor it), the reasons might actually be religious in nature.

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We read in The Wire, in an article titled “World Bank’s Research Paper That Concluded Declining Trend of Toilet Usage in India Withdrawn” (December 2, 2023):

The Work Bank has recalled its departmental working paper, which concluded that there is a “most concerning” trend of toilet usage declining in rural India since 2018 despite early gains of the Swachh Bharat Mission–Gramin, The Hindu reported.

 

There are allegations that the paper has been recalled under pressure from the Narendra Modi government. Besides the one cited above, two other papers have been withdrawn pending an “internal review” as well as “technical and procedural issues”. In the same breath, the World Bank also notes that the papers published on its website go through required approvals internally before they are made available online.

 

The contentious paper – Progress on Sanitation in Rural India: Reconciling Diverse Evidence – published in September concluded that despite “breathtaking” gains in increasing toilet access, toilet usage had been going down in rural India since 2018. The largest drop in usage is reported among people from Scheduled Caste (20 percentage points) and Scheduled Tribe (24 percentage points) communities.

As highlighted in the last paragraph above, India’s open defecation problem seems to be rooted in Hinduism’s caste (also called “varna” or “race and color”) system.

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This is something that had actually already been demonstrated by authors Diane Coffey and Dean Spears in their 2017 book, Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste, which has been summarized as follows in The Caravan:

In their book, Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste, Coffey and Spears investigate why more than half the Indian population defecates in the open in India, and why, despite schemes such as the Swachh Bharat Mission­­—the central government’s flagship sanitation project—the use of latrines in rural India remains low. As part of the research for the book, the writers, along with a research team, traveled to various parts of rural Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and Tamil Nadu. They found that the primary reason for poor sanitation in rural areas is the persistence of caste prejudices—most Indians, especially upper-caste Hindus, continue to associate defecation with impurity or “dirty” practices, and are often unwilling to have latrines constructed in their otherwise “pure” homes. This prejudice is a by-product of caste hierarchies, which relegate any work involving proximity to human waste to those considered lower-caste, and perpetuate practices such as manual scavenging. […]

 

How these prejudices further unsanitary practices is illustrated in the excerpt below: despite recommended World Health Organisation standards for small, affordable latrine pits, most homes in rural India desist from having these installed, or build extremely large pits in the ground—thereby increasing the cost of building toilets, among other issues. The reason behind these decisions, Coffey and Spears found, is that most people refuse to participate in the process of emptying of latrine pits. In the extract, the writers discuss their findings regarding this reluctance, and explain how it is rooted in caste.

 

In other developing countries, where untouchability and manual scavenging never existed, emptying latrine pits is a job done by people who are poor and down on their luck. But they are not people whose parents were prevented from drawing water from a well. They are not people whose parents were forced to eat scraps after public functions. In other countries, emptying latrine pits is an unpleasant job rather than a symbol of generations of oppression and humiliation. India’s history of untouchability—and the way it is being renegotiated in villages today—is what makes the job of emptying latrine pits in Indian villages markedly different from other places in the developing world.

So, while in other contexts the reasons may indeed be socioeconomic (lack of access to proper sanitation), believe it or not, in this particular case, it appears to be rooted within the Hindu caste system itself. Disfranchised groups, such as the Dalits, are relegated to doing the “dirty work” as a way to reflect the innate ritual impurity that supposedly accompanies their caste.

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It seems that, as long as India remains a Hindu-majority country, open defecation will continue to remain a persistent and enduring problem.

It is also worth remembering that Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), the most influential modern Hindu guru, has often (perhaps quite reluctantly) contrasted Hinduism and Islam when it comes to the question of hygiene, as we read in an epistle dated to 1894, wherein he expressed his remorse over the fact that Westerners found the Hindus to be particularly unsanitary:

Our method of cooking with cow-dung fuel and eating on the floor they consider eating like pigs: they say that the Hindus have no sense of disgust and that, like pigs, they eat cow-dung.

 

[…]

 

In Rajputana they imitate the Mohammedans in their mode of dining, which is, on the whole, good. They sit on a low seat and place their plate of rice on a low table. This is much better than spreading a banana leaf on the earthen floor plastered with cow-dung and filth. And how disastrous if the leaf gets torn! The Hindus did not know much about clothes or food.

He is even more honest and explicit in another of his writings, “To My Brave Boys,” also dated to 1894:

We talk foolishly against material civilisation. The grapes are sour. Even taking all that foolishness for granted, in all India there are, say, a hundred thousand really spiritual men and women. Now, for the spiritualisation of these, must three hundred millions be sunk in savagery and starvation? Why should any starve? How was it possible for the Hindus to have been conquered by the Mohammedans? It was due to the Hindus’ ignorance of material civilization. Even the Mohammedans taught them to wear tailor-made clothes. Would the Hindus had learnt from the Mohammedans how to eat in a cleanly way without mixing their food with the dust of the streets!

Perhaps then Hindus should listen to their guru and learn from the Muslims. They can either embrace the truth that is Islam or remain the perpetual victims of all these “Designated Shitting Streets” memes.

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