The Swachh Bharat Mission hopes to make India open-defecation free by October 2019. But, despite the rush in the construction of toilets since the scheme’s launch, India has the highest rate of open defecation in the world. According to a new study by the World Bank, 48% of Indians continue to defecate in the open—much higher than what the government’s official records say. According to the latest NSSO survey, 33% of people in rural India and only 4% in urban India defecate in the open.
According to the study, even among the households with toilets, nearly 40% have members who defecate in the open. This is so, because social norms and cultural beliefs, rather than economic conditions, act as barriers to toilet use. An earlier Plain Facts column had raised these concerns.
In their study, Varun Gauri, Tasmia Rahma and Iman Sen surveyed five villages in Uttar Pradesh to measure four key aspects of open defecation: defecation practices, acceptability of open defecation, enforcement of toilet use, and notions of purity attached to toilet construction. They find that people’s beliefs are closely linked to their perceptions of what others believe, highlighting how social norms determine individual attitudes. In the context of open defecation, this is important because people associate toilets with gandagi (dirt). They also tend to underestimate the use of toilets among others in the community. Both these factors ultimately result in toilets being underused. However, the authors also show that these social norms can be changed.
They reveal that simply informing people who defecate in the open about the growth of toilet use in their neighbourhood and stressing that open defecation is no longer the norm can lead to changes in attitude and, subsequently, toilet use. Besides, targeting people’s beliefs through campaigns, which “rebrand” toilet use as clean can have a similar impact. The authors conclude that low-cost information campaigns can effectively improve the beliefs and practices around toilet use.
For Swachh Bharat, which has focused so much on toilet construction, these findings suggest that addressing open defecation may require more nuanced solutions that tackle the underlying psychological and social barriers in India.