Reading Response: Where India Goes

Introduction

The title of the book “Where India Goes” in itself is a witticism. When one picks up this book and reads the title and then the synopsis at the back, it is very clear what the book is about. The authors have literally explained with simple statistics what the tagline for the Swachh Bharat mission ‘Swachhata is everyone’s business’ means.

The authors of the book Diane Coffey and Dean Spears initially set out to understand the reasons behind India’s abysmal Human Development Index (HDI), Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), under 5 mortality rate and the stunted growth of Indian children. They kept coming back to one prominent factor in their research: the problem of open defecation in India. They then focused their research on finding the reasons behind this pertinent problem. They set up the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics in India to take the research to its logical conclusion.

The Book begins with a foreword from the eminent nobel prize winning economist Angus Deaton who discusses how, despite the Indian economy being a star performer on the GDP per capita front, the adults in India are still among the shortest in the world. He says that “It is an intellectual puzzle for economics and for global health, but for Indians themselves, it is an ongoing catastrophe.” (pg xi, para 2)

The book is introduced with a story of one of the residents of the village where the authors started their research. It lays the foundation for the rest of the book and in a way gives the reasoning for the research. The introduction in short, details out what the book is about, chapter wise. The book is divided in three parts, causes, consequences and responses.

Causes

In the second chapter the authors lay out the puzzle of the cause of open defecation in India. They list down general perceptions for the cause of people choosing to continue to defecate in the open, being:

• It may be because of poverty
• It may be because of lack of improved water
• It may be because of illiteracy
• It may be because of poor governance
• It is definitely because of lack of access to a latrine

The reasons listed above were one by one demolished by showing on a descriptive graph how similarly placed countries were faring on the count of open defecation. All the research pointed towards the issue of caste and the idea of purity being the driving factor behind open defecation.

The third chapter further enunciates the point of how the idea of purity is what drives people to continue to defecate in the open. The authors refer to an article of Anand Teltumbde who says that “Indians throw their trash on the ground not merely out of laziness but also to assert their superiority over Dalits. It is, after all, Dalits who are expected to clean public spaces.” (chapter 3, pg 59, para 1)

The fourth chapter goes into the logistics of making a dry pit latrine and cleaning one when full. The chapter explains the difference between the World Health Organisation recommended latrine and the Swachh Bharat Mission commissioned latrines, where the latter were much more expensive and much larger than the specifications of the former. The authors realised that in other countries the dry pit latrines were cleared physically by hand.

In India, this would mean going back to the days of manual scavenging. If one is found engaging dalits in such work, it would attract punishment. Most people despite getting latrines under the swachh bharat mission and its predecessor scheme refuse to use them as they, in the long run, don’t want to worry about clearing the pit up. Though the authors were incredibly surprised when they met this one individual who did take the effort to clean up his dry pit latrine himself. He said a very pertinent line “When untouchability is gone, the country will be free”(chapter 4, pg 90, para 2).

One of the authors put down the quantitative data while noting that “... indeed those villages where a higher fraction of people said that someone in their family practices untouchability are the same villages where a higher fraction of households defecates in the open”(chapter 4, pg 91, para 2).

Consequences

The fifth chapter talks about the results of persons continuing to defecate in the open. It is someone else’s fecal matter that causes diseases to a person. They spoke about the germ theory and how the world has moved from then to now and people have longer lives. In India also people have longer lives due to advancement in medicine but those children who survive are not necessarily having optimum growth. Their height is stunted, their cognitive ability is stunted.

The authors again did comparisons between children in West Bengal and Bangladesh and showed how the height graph of children who are similarly placed economically, fare differently, wherein the Bangladeshi children are taller. They also elucidated on how the parasites present in the fecal matter when it enters a child’s body attaches itself to the intestine and consumes the nutrients which should ideally have been utilised by the child for its physical and mental growth.

The sixth chapter deals with the economic consequences of open defecation. They cited research that showed taller people are much smarter and as a result tend to earn more. If the government invests in tackling the problem of open defecation, they will in turn get more money in their coffers as the population at large will earn more.

The seventh chapter talked about the people who actually need the latrines are the disabled, the elderly and young women(who otherwise would be only allowed in the dark or with company). Women welcome defecating in the open as otherwise they are holed up in the confines of their homes. People very staunchly hold on to the idea of open defecation to be beneficial as they think open air will cure all ailments.

Responses

The eighth chapter elaborates on the viability of the Swachh Bharat Mission, since its inception. They even discussed the predecessor schemes to tackle open defecation and the commitment made by the current Prime Minister. Though the plan seems very good on paper, the actual translation into action is a far from reality, as there is a massive gap between what the government planned to invest for the results and what is happening at the ground level.

The authors also mentioned how the government is concentrating on construction of toilets and giving data about that and not of the actual use of the toilets. Most stakeholders at the village level who are responsible for construction of such toilets are more interested in the kickbacks than achieving meaningful results. Moreover there is no cogent data collection, as there is no investment in getting people equipped to digitise the data. The authors identified the real need was dissemination of the “Why” of the need to tackle the problem, for which there has been no real investment.

Recommendations

In the final chapter, the authors conclude with some recommendations and predictions. First and foremost, they predict the obvious, that India will not be open defecation free by 2019 as is the vision of the Swachh Bharat Mission.

The recommendations are:

• Measure open defecation with independent surveys and make realistic plans
• Talk about culture, choices and caste
• Test and modify strategies about pollution and pits

The book is based on a lot of research and data collection, collaborations with various experts in their fields, colloquy with stakeholders. Despite coming from a non-Indian background, getting acquainted with the caste problem of India and coming to the conclusion that the caste system is responsible for the continuance of open defecation is commendable. When one looks at problems like these, they look at tackling the problem head on without doing much research on why such phenomena occurs.

The caste system in India has so many layers to it, the authors still managed to scratch a bit of the surface and identified it as the main causation of the phenomenon and prevalence of open defecation. They used case stories to simplify what they were talking about as well as in pertinent places graphs to prove their point. When I was reading the part where the Badaun case was being discussed I remembered a case in UP I had come across where a spurned boy attacked a girl with acid when she was returning from the fields after defecating. While safety of women is a decent reason for constructing latrines in one’s house, it should definitely not be that women should then anyways be restricted to the confines of the house.

This is my second book which I have read on an issue/issues in India by foreigners, first being ‘India’ by Patrick French. It definitely gives one an outsider perspective when one reads a piece by someone who is not acquainted with the goings on of the community. The investment that the authors have made for this research is laudable in terms of their time and energy. The authors using the female gender to address India and her children was also a nice touch.

The authors took a very neutral stand and did not conduct a blame game, did not make their work sound preachy, nor did they come out with strict directions to achieve the end of the problem of open defecation. They very cohesively laid down their data in a very systemic format and put it forward for us to decide what to do with such data. The book does not delve deep into the issue of caste since there isn’t a need to do so. Yet for those with a background in work where one deals with caste issues on a daily basis, it reiterates their contentions.