Today I would like to write about a topic which I deem quite important, even if other people may find it to be a minor matter or even think it is not something I should be writing about in my blog at all: toilets. Yes, today I will be writing about defecation problems. No, not about diarrhea and constipation – although I might some day make a post about that, too, suggesting Ayurvedic remedies that we use in our retreats as well – but about India’s lack of toilets!
In India, 46.9% of people don’t have a toilet at home. 53.2% of people however own a mobile phone!
Give yourself a minute to let this sink in! About 600 million people in this huge country go out to empty their bowels. When I say out, I mean really out, for most cases! In fields, at the side of the road, into the gutter – out!
Unfortunately, many people actually don’t have any other choice and that is something that every tourist notices who travels around India. A day sightseeing in any town? Tourists are grateful for toilets in restaurants, because public toilets are rare – or horribly dirty. Driving across the country? A nightmare for women who of course cannot just sit at the side of the road to empty their bladder, as men do! Toilets at the gas stations? Non-existing or in an unimaginable state of filthiness!
Tourists here have to face the lack of public toilets and the lack of hygiene in the few which are available. This is something they may remember from their own country’s past or know from stories of former generations that it was similar on their public toilets in the past as well. What they don’t normally see however is the situation of people’s home – and I believe they would often be more than astonished to know the truth!
Apart from the fact that we are just missing the infrastructure, that there are just not enough toilets, many people also have a very strange attitude towards this place. It should actually, from a point of hygiene, be the place that it cleaned most often and which is kept the most clean of all. Some – or actually many – Indians think however, that a toilet is something dirty, a place where you do something dirty, so there is no point in keeping it clean! After having used the toilet, some very old-fashioned people even shower each time! They clean themselves – but they don’t get the idea to clean the place instead!
In many Indian homes you will see a pair of shoes standing next to the toilet room’s door. It is a pair of shoes, often broken, which you only wear in this room. It is for this dirty work – and you can imagine that these shoes are never cleaned. Everyone uses them for this room – which is very sparsely cleaned – and they get more and more dirty. Obviously you would take a shower after such an experience!
That’s how many people don’t even want to have a toilet in their home! Maybe a separate toilet room outside or right away the fields.
Those people who have the job of cleaning toilets, are called ‘untouchable’. They are considered by many people as dirty – and they do the dirty work. That is the problem of the Indian mindset and the base of the caste problem: don’t they see that this is the most important work, keeping an important place clean – and making it a good place, not a dirty one.
I think I don’t even need to start on the health aspects of this discussion! The amount of diseases that are only spread and caused by open defecation and unhygienic toilets!
To make it short: India needs more toilet and apart from that, the attitude towards toilets has to change! Maybe someone has to start a petition, a campaign to improve the image of this room, this space, this important location! Maybe we all can set a sign – by keeping our own toilets clean and sitting a bit longer 🙂
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