India as a Scatological Superpower

Why Indian defecatory habits and statistics remain a marvel for those inclined to study them

NEW DELHI ~ Who can forget Naipaul’s famous refrain on India’s ‘national pastime’? ‘They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover…’ Not much has changed since 1968, going by a recent Unicef survey: India is home to 58 per cent of the world’s 1.1 billion who defecate in the open. China and Indonesia come a distant second, with 5 per cent.

India’s Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh declared his “great anguish” at the statistic recently. But there are more alarming statistics to contend with. Shit carries 50 communicable diseases. An estimated 400,000 Indian children under the age of five die of diarrhoea every year. Only 30 per cent of India’s urban and 3 per cent of rural folk have access to pour/flush toilets.

According to Rose George, author of the 2009 book, The Big Necessity: Adventures In The World Of Human Waste, which does for hitherto unmentionable bodily functions what Foucault did for sexuality and madness: ‘India takes up nearly three chapters and could have taken more because the country provides the best and the worst of shit. The best, in that it has some fantastically plainspeaking and passionate activists such as Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas in Orissa, or Kamal Kar, who pioneered Community-Led Total Sanitation, which attempts to awaken villagers to the deeply unhygienic nature of open defecation by using disgust, humour and pride. I also write about manual scavenging, which is simply a disgrace and still going on, 70 years after Gandhi condemned it.’ About two decades after the practice was banned, the Indian Railways remains the biggest employer of manual scavengers, with its 172,000 toilets releasing waste on railway tracks daily.

About The Author

Shruti Ravindran