A Memior of Two Toilet Inspectors

India has witnessed the world's largest behaviour change programme, as the mandarins of the country's sanitation programme called it. From 2014 to 2019, more than 100 million toilets were made. The government paid for these and a myriad of people toiled for the toilets. There are stories of sacrifice and valour as in any military mission. Only, making toilets is not a conquest. It is a change in the way of life for hundreds of millions living a perilous rural existence. Toilets...
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India has witnessed the world's largest behaviour change programme, as the mandarins of the country's sanitation programme called it. From 2014 to 2019, more than 100 million toilets were made. The government paid for these and a myriad of people toiled for the toilets. There are stories of sacrifice and valour as in any military mission. Only, making toilets is not a conquest. It is a change in the way of life for hundreds of millions living a perilous rural existence. Toilets competed with their priorities for food, water and jobs. In the building frenzy, a dark comedy emerged.The frenzy unleashed an army of experts, an avalanche of money and a winner-takes-it-all method. In what followed, history repeated itself. India has run none-too-successful programmes to provide toilets for people since the 1950s. In 1999, the paradigm changed. From being a government benefactor-led programme, it became demand-led. People were to be convinced to make toilets by skilled motivators. They would apply to the government, get a subsidy and put in their own money to make one. Progress crawled, as the authors have documented, from 1999 to 2014.The toilet-tango continued through successive avatars - the Total Sanitation Campaign became the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012. And the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. Recording changes in the decade from 2007 to 2017, through interviews and observations across seven states and about 20 districts, the authors aver the more things changed, the more they remained the same. The government made people build toilets and paid out subsidies in 2007. They continued doing so in 2017, but insisted these were termed incentives, not subsidies. The pay out in 2017 was 10 times that in 2007. A powerful motivator, the writers found.