Every year, 188,000 children under five in India die due to diarrhea-related illnesses. This catastrophic burden on children’s health is largely due to the fact that over a third of the Indian population defecates in the open. Open defecation (OD) also has strong gender impacts; women feel constrained to relieve themselves only under the cover of darkness, for reasons of privacy and to protect their dignity. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), rapes and molestation incidents commonly occur while women are out at night. Detrimental health impacts of open defecation are even more significant in population dense areas, like UP (828 persons per km in the district; Census 2011).

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS): An approach that works?

Despite many efforts from the Indian government, the problem of OD persists, largely due to the common belief that defecating in the open is natural and healthy and that building a latrine in the house brings impurity to it. It has not been well established that the root cause of the problem is not the unavailability of toilets but the unwillingness of the rural people to embrace the change. Hence while doing the fieldwork in UP as a TCI scholar, I realized, in collaboration with Grameen Development Services (GDS), that social norms and habits will need to be altered if open defecation is to be successfully combated. Simply building more toilets will not do the job.

Community-led, demand driven interventions to combat open defecation practices, like Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), are different from other approaches of sanitation promotion in the sense that they focus not on mere construction of toilets and saturating an area/village with toilets, but on bringing about behavioral change in the communities, making community members use the toilets and stop defecating in open, and consequently, make their village or hamlet open defecation free (ODF).

In collaboration with GDS, we will be implementing CLTS in UP in various phases before and after the construction of toilets. The first stage of the process is arriving in the village, explaining the purpose of the visit and establishing rapport with the community. With GDS as our partnering organization, and with their widespread liaisons in these villages, the program is able to hit the ground running from day one and will begin with the following procedures, following the CLTS Handbook:

Defecation area transect or “The Walk of Shame”

This consists of a walk with the villagers to the places where they usually defecate. According to the CLTS handbook, the objective of this walk “is standing in the OD area, inhaling the unpleasant smell and taking in the unpleasant sight. Experiencing this in a new collective way, accompanied by a visitor to the community embarrasses the villages and becomes the key trigger for mobilization.”

Defecation mapping

Mapping of defecation areas entails facilitating the community to draw the map of their village on the ground demarcating the fields, rivers, schools, houses, etc. using different colored chalks and small papers. Then community members are asked to fill the map with a yellow chalk illustrating where people, then animals, defecate; the process gradually fills the whole map with yellow chalk. The ubiquity of the yellow nudges the community into self-realization about the condition of their villages.