In rural India, extremes of coercion are being used to encourage toilet use writes Liz Chatterjee in the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog. Her provocative post has drawn comments from the likes of Robert Chambers, Rose George, Ned Breslin and Erik Harvey.
Published on: 06/07/2011
In rural India, extremes of coercion are being used to encourage toilet use writes Liz Chatterjee in the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog. Her provocative post has drawn comments from the likes of Robert Chambers, Rose George, Ned Breslin and Erik Harvey.
Liz Chatterjee wrote in her blog post:
Robert Chambers recently wrote that community-led total sanitation is leading to a development revolution, especially in south Asia. I agree with his assessment of sanitation's importance. In practice, however, the success of community-led efforts often hinges on the use of outright coercion. In my experience, the measures used to encourage the use of toilets range from stone-throwing and public humiliation to bizarre scare stories about congenital abnormalities.
Last summer, I travelled to a semi-rural district in the southern Indian state of Karnataka as part of a four-strong group. India's national Total Sanitation Campaign had led to an astonishing rise from 20% toilet usage in the area to almost 100% in just two years. We planned to produce a case study of success for project sponsors Unicef from which lessons for best practice could be drawn for the benefit of other parts of the country.
A spectacular rise in toilets usage from 20% to nearly 100% in a semi-rural district in Karnataka, realised by India’s national Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), Ms Chatterjee discovered, was founded on community-led coercion. Previous efforts to build toilets in the area failed to ensure actual use. They were often used to store firewood or chickens while families continued to defecate outdoors.
But some of the techniques used to persuade reluctant community members to construct toilets were unorthodox to say the least. Chatterjee was equally shocked by some of the “sensationalist scare tactics” used in TSC educational campaigns.
Chatterjee’s article has sparked a lively discussion, with 26 comments posted. In a reaction to several comments stressing that the TSC is not the same as community-led total sanitation (CLTS), the author counters that “TSC can offer insights into what scaled-up, state-sponsored CLTS-influenced programmes might look like as they’re rolled out across developing countries [and that] the TSC is undoubtedly an evolution that follows the logic of CLTS.”
The incentive to use extreme coercion to force a minority of non-ODF adopters to comply seems to have been fuelled by the TSC’s financial reward scheme (Nirmal Gram Puraskar).
Source: Liz Chatterjee, Time to acknowledge the dirty truth behind community-led sanitation, Poverty Matters Blog / The Guardian, 08 Jun 2011
