RANDOM ACCESS. Spirituality and the seventh goal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has got some unexpected allies in his goal to make India a cleaner, more sanitary nation — an alliance of religious leaders of all faiths. A motley array of saffron-clad swamijis, shaven-headed Buddhist monks, Muslim imams and Christian padres, are fanning out across the country, spreading the message of the importance of toilets with temples, of cleanliness with godliness.

Astonishingly, Modi, and the BJP, which one might have thought would have little hesitation in embracing theocratic means to achieve its ends, have nothing to do with this. The movement is being pushed by that most secular of all institutions, the United Nations!

The Unicef, which sees better sanitation as a key enabler of achieving its overall child and maternal health objectives, has decided to rope in spiritual leaders of all faiths in a bid to try and effect societal change in an area where both multilateral commitments and government campaigns have failed.

That the Unicef sees Modi’s Swachh Bharat Mission as something to back is not surprising. After all, the objectives of the Swachh Bharat Mission — elimination of open defecation, eradication of manual scavenging, developing scientific municipal solid waste management practices, and basically effecting behavioural changes regarding sanitation and personal hygiene practices dovetail almost completely with its own goals outlined under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) programme. The seventh MDG, under the broader remit of achieving environmental sustainability, focuses specifically on sanitation. Its goal was to halve, by this year, the number of people in the world without access to sanitation and safe drinking water.

When they were first rolled out 15 years ago, the Millennium Development Goals looked like they were setting a difficult but achievable target for the world to aim at. The eight MDGs straddled a range of laudable objectives, from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education. They were all supposed to have been achieved by the target date of 2015.

The task was big, but back then, around the turn of the millennium, there was also a fair bit of hope that mankind would be able to learn all the correct lessons from the 20th century for the 21st. Large parts of the world were also beginning to shake off the yoke of centuries of poverty, while others, like India, which had embarked on an ambitious programme of economic reforms just about a decade earlier, were accelerating towards the take-off point.

The plan, one of the very few UN initiatives which managed to win total universal acceptance, with every single nation in the world signing on the dotted line and every global development institution accepting it, looked achievable given the scale of commitments expressed. Besides, a decade-and-a-half was a long time.

But time, as is its wont, inexorably passes and we are here in the target year. Many of the MDGs have been met, others have been missed, while yet others have been changed by shifting goalposts. Like the first MDG, which was to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day. That target was met five years ahead of schedule (although more than a billion people continue to live in extreme poverty), but the target itself is irrelevant. The more accepted poverty line target is per capita consumption of $2 per day on a PPP basis. Even estimates of the number of actual poor can vary wildly, as India’s own experiences with drawing a poverty line has shown.

As for the seventh goal, one of the biggest reasons why that particular MDG has been missed is India. India’s sanitation track record is spectacularly unsanitary. Every day, 595 million Indians — half the population — defecate in the open. Some 69 per cent of the rural population and 18 per cent of the urban population, according to official data, practice open defecation. A vast majority of homes do not have a toilet. The percentage of homes without toilets is as high as 92 in Jharkhand, and 87 in Rajasthan. Even in ‘developed’ Tamil Nadu, 76 per cent of homes lack a loo.

Even where toilets exist, in more than a quarter of households with a toilet, the facilities are not used. Lack of water, and lack of waste disposal facilities — or nonfunctional sewage disposal systems — mean that using the toilets simply means converting one’s home into a smelly repository of undisposable waste.

Lack of toilets and lack of water means that millions of people have no exposure to basic sanitation habits at all. This has had dire consequences — India has the highest number of diarrhoeal deaths among children under five years of age in the world — more than two lakh deaths per year due to diarrhoea. A 2008 WHO study found that a vast majority of such deaths — 88 per cent — were directly attributable to poor sanitation, unsafe water and unhygienic practices.

Prime Minister Modi is hoping to break this deadly cycle by launching a high pressure campaign, leading the awareness movement from the front and by building toilets — more than one crore households are expected to be provided with toilets by the time this government’s term of office ends.

Unicef is hoping that this can be pushed along by using religious leaders, who can help break societal taboos by openly discussing such issues, and by convincing entire communities to end the practice of open defecation and use mass gatherings as well as daily worship to promote sanitation and hygiene practices.

This is a noble and laudable goal, but the question is, can religious leaders make a difference? They have been pretty good at getting Indians to do some things, but not others.

The easier the option, the better the hit rate. So, lakhs of people do kapaalbhati pranayama or drink bottle gourd juice, but erasing corruption from the system proved a lot more difficult.

One wonders whether sanitation might meet the same fate.

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