End open air defecation in India

End open air defecation in India According to UNICEF: “Open defecation refers to the practice whereby people go out in fields, bushes, forests, open bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than using the toilet to defecate”. Open defecation represents a serious threat to the health of people (especially children) in India, where the estimated percentage of population practicing open defecation is around 40% (WHO/ UNICEF 2017 data). Open defecation was found by the WHO in 2014 to be a leading cause of diarrheal death. It is also an important factor that causes various diseases such as diarrhea, intestinal worm infections, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid and others. It can lead to environment and water pollution when rain flushes feces that are dispersed in the environment into surface water or unprotected wells. There are strong gender impacts connected with this practice: the lack of safe, private toilets makes women and girls vulnerable to violence and is an impediment to girls' education. Women are at risk of sexual molestation and rape as they search for places for open defecation that are secluded and private, often during hours of darkness.

The international commitment to end open air defecation worldwide is underlined in the SDG 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development set by the United Nations. Goal 6 states: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” and its target 6.2 asserts: “By 2030 achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations”. The data highlight how far we have come since 2000. Open defecation rates have fallen and billions have gained access to basic water and sanitation services. Despite these successes, progress has been uneven in both areas, with wide disparities among and within countries. Although the data show a great improvement, around 892 million people worldwide continue to lack even the most rudimentary sanitation and still practice open air defecation.

In October 2014, the Prime Minister of India launched an ambitious national sanitation program that aims to eliminate open defecation by 2019. The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) has unprecedented political support and has mobilized nearly $25 billion from Government, the private sector and civil society. The program targets behaviour change and community approaches to sanitation are being adopted throughout the country. The SBM has developed a national database with detailed information on latrine coverage down to the household level and a multi-stage verification process. As of June 2017, according to the SBM, over 205,000 villages, 149 districts and five States had reported themselves to be open defecation free.

The Government estimated that since the start of the Mission, in October 2014, coverage of latrines in rural India has increased from 42% to 65%, and the number of rural Indians defecating in the open had come down from 550 to 330 million people by June 2017. The SBM program recognizes the need to go beyond reporting infrastructure coverage, and is conducting population-based surveys to determine household use of sanitation facilities, which is the internationally agreed-upon indicator used by JMP (WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene) to compare progress across countries. Within the governmental program a joint initiative organized by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and UNICEF aims to increase the capacity of local and national actors working in WASH in schools. The world has made steady progress: the proportion of the global population practising open defecation decreased from 20% to 12% between 2000 and 2015. But much remains to be done, especially in rural areas, where open defecation has been declining at a rate of just 0.7 percentage points per year. This rate would need to more than double in order to eliminate open defecation in rural areas by 2030.

HEEALS (Health, Education, Environment And Livelihood Society) is one of those organizations directly involved in facing and solving open air defecation problem. It is working on Water Sanitation, Menstrual Hygiene and Toilet Building projects in seven states: Delhi (National Capital Region), Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal, Uttranchal, Leh and Uttar Pradesh. HEEALS works in slum schools, schools in unauthorised colonies, orphanages and refugee camps. Through spreading education on Sanitation, Menstrual Hygiene and building clean safe, toilets HEEALS is working to increase the attendance rates of pupils in schools, reduce the number of diseases and deaths and improve the health of people across Indian society.


Manuel Mezzadra WASH intern





References: Diarrhoeal diseases, WHO, 10th march 2014 Fear and anger: Perceptions of risks related to sexual violence against women linked to water and sanitation in Delhi, India - Briefing Note. SHARE (Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity) and WaterAid, UK, Lennon, S. (2011). Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, 2017 updates and SDG baselines. WHO/ UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation Violence, Gender & WASH: A Practitioner’s Toolkit – Making water, sanitation and hygiene safer through improved programming and services, House, Sarah, Suzanne Ferron, Marni Sommer and Sue Cavill (2014). Webography: http://heeals.org https://heeals.blogspot.com http://unicef.in/whatwedo/11/eliminate-open-defecation https://washdata.org/reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_defecation#Impacts -

Toilet For Healthier, Dignified And Free Life

The possibility of access to safe, accessible and clean sanitary facilities reperesent an added value to the dignity of man and, in this particular context, of women.

In India, one of the greatest challenges is to provide women the opportunity to use safe and functional toilets to manage their personal hygiene. Many people in India are forced to defecate outdoors which not only corresponds to a lack of privacy but also to a mismanagement of hygiene because there isn’t clean water available to wash your hands and clean the body after defecation.

Although the Indian state is engaging through the Swachh Bharat mission undertaken on 2^nd of October, 2014 to ensure that the entire Indian population has the benefit of being able to use safe toilets,still today, access to clean water and sanitation is a great problem.In India, about 522 million people still defecate in the open, increasing the risk of spreading diseases like diarrhoea and other types of viruses, not being able to wash their hands and walk for the most part barefoot.According to Indian government data mission the percentage of children who do not have access to the toilet corresponds to 50.2% of males 44.6% of females compared to those who instead use accessible baths that account for 26% of males and 24% of females.Although the state is committed to providing more infrastructure, the problem affects more deepen in the socio-cultural and educational aspect. More specifically, this factor affects the dignity of women and respect for gender equality.

Women who live in rural areas and in suburban villages that do not have toilets, often reduce themselves keeping their physiological needs until the night, and look for a land abandoned, miles away from home in the complete darkness to be able to relieve themselves. This, however, exposes them to a high risk not only to contract parasitic diseases but also to the nights dangers, as ill-intentioned that would sexually abuse them or would like to rob them.According to research, 70% of abused women suffered this type of violence while looking for a place to defecate far from their home.

Keeping the physiological needs, brings serious consequences to metabolism, requiring your body an unnatural effort that causes infections both in the urinary tract and in the intestine due to the bacteria not expelled for too long by our body. According to the Indian Medical Association, retaining physiological needs for a long time, and not expelling them when the body requires, itcan also cause the intestine to collapse as well as the lack of assimilation of nutrients. Indeed, some data reported by the Indian government in 2013 show that 33.5% of women in the state of Andhra Pradesh weigh below the threshold established by the World Health Organization (WHO), also declaring that the% 63 of women suffer from anaemia such as % 56.4 of pregnant women, while men reach 20%.The Indian Medical Association also added that resisting to defecate necessity provoke and accumulation of gases in the intestine that damage the inner bacterial flora which becomes weak and don’t protect the intestine from intestinal virus and bacterial infections easily verifiable in case of bad quality of the water. Data show that, 1.7 million cases of diarrhoeal diseases were registered in Andhra Pradesh in 2013, more than half of them in women.

Hygiene Education and the good practices.

The absence of a toilets or a latrine where to defecate, also means not having available clean water to be able to wash hands after defecating. This means that the faeces bacteria are transferred to the hands and contaminate everything that the hands touch, like the food that women cook. Being able to manage one's own hygiene is fundamental in order to avoid many infectious diseases. However, it is necessary to explain the value of this practice, because unfortunately it is not common, especially for those used to defecate in the open. The importance of disease prevention is often not understood because it changes the practices of common use which contrast the willingness to use latrines because they are considered dirty. It is important to act through education and teaching also at school level of which are the unfortunate causes caused by a lack of personal hygiene and defecation outdoors. In this respect, the intervention of many NGOs, such as HEEAL, is vital for the purpose of learning and achieving hygiene practices. In fact, for HEEALS the objectives are schools, where children are the right age to fully understand and not have already rooted improper practices, difficult to change. Through interactive lessons, Heeals promotes and supports personal hygiene education and adequate water use, in order to guarantee children, and adults who learn from children, a healthier life by avoiding many diseases.

-Elisa Stucchi.

Hand wash workshop in Ghaziabad Schools

We organised hand wash workshop in Delhi ,Ghaziabad and Noida Schools and Distributed Free soaps ,tooth brush and shampoo to children .

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The Thorn in India’s Environmental Side: Open Defecation and a Review of Swachh Bharat

Happy World Environment Day from all of us here at HEEALS! In honour of this important day, this blog post will reflect on India as this year’s global host for World Environment Day, with specific focus on The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation’s “Swachh Bharat Mission”, and it’s goal of making India Open Defecation Free (ODF) by 2019.

India is the open defecation capital of the world, with just under half of the population - 564 million people - unable or unwilling to use a toilet.^[1] Beyond the obvious and devastating impacts that this has on Indian health, open defecation is a serious environmental concern for several reasons. Human waste introduces toxins and bacteria into the ecosystem that cannot be broken down in a sustainable time, relative to the amount that they are released. This buildup of microbes harms aquatic systems and the life that occupy them. Open defecation also contributes to eutrophication, preventing light diffusion and oxygen from reaching life underwater. Above the surface, even the smell of human waste in excess pollutes the surrounding air.^[2] One often hears of open defecation from the perspective of it's health impacts, and for good reason; However, regarding open defecation from an environmental lens provides a more nuanced and complex perspective to the issue.

On October 2nd, 2014, the Prime Minister of India launched the “Swachh Bharat Mission” with the objective of facilitating a clean and ODF country over a five-year time span. The strategy for implementing this massive task includes augmenting the institutional capacity of districts to allow for behaviour change activities at the grassroots level. The program also intended on providing more flexibility to states, so as to incentivize local communities based on individual context and maximize coverage.^[3] The mission places priority on facilitating behaviour change, as many rural communities are unaware of the health and environmental impacts of open defecation, and therefore see it as more convenient than using a toilet.

So, with just over a year left until the projected “ODF India”, let’s explore how the project has performed; The Swachh Bharat website suggests the facilitation of 17 ODF states since 2014, with a grand total of 73,680,690 household toilets built since October 2014.^[4] The mission has reached 62.48% of its goal, and while nowhere near the projected 100% ODF, one must commend the mission on having made it this far. With a population size like India’s, making any claim for completeness - especially regarding something as ingrained in society as open defecation - is quite unlikely to be achieved. Nonetheless, 62.48% is quite significant. The five districts with the highest ODF coverage are ordered as follows: A & N Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigard, Chattisgarh, and D & N Haveli.

Now for the projects downfalls. For a project that claimed to give more autonomy to individual states, there is a significant gap in the project implementation that leaves Low-Income States (LIS) behind. The four listed LIS - Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh - lack the same progress as their neighbouring states in terms of ODF districts. For example, of the 33 districts in Assam, only 11 were declared ODF, and the verification information is not listed on the website. In Uttar Pradesh, only 7 out of 75 states were declared ODF, and of those 7, only 2 were actually verified ODF.^[5] This is in comparison to states such as Haryana, Gujarat and Chattisgarh, where 100% of districts were both declared and verified as being ODF.

While it makes sense to contextualize local realities by regulating Swachh Bharat at a state level, it does not help to ignore state capacity in the process- without aiding Low-Income States reach the same level of progress as those more capable, Swachh Bharat becomes less of a national mission, and more of a fragmented mission open to states who are able to implement it properly.

This World Environment Day, let us reflect on our own individual capacities to do better for our world, and take these capacities into account in our advocacy work. Let us raise each other up in the process of creating a better and more sustainable planet. Happy World Environment Day!

-Jayde 

WASH and Menstrual Hygiene Intern Coordinator

source:

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^[1] http://www.teamswachhbharat.in/get-the-facts.php

^[2] https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/how-open-defecation-affect-human-health-environment-and-solutions.php

^[3] http://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm

^[4] http://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm

^[5] https://sbm.gov.in/sbmReport/Report/Physical/SBM_VillageODFMarkStatus.aspx