Live mint : Toilet training and hygiene lessons for Orissa’s rural poor : Sept 10, 2007
SIXTY IN SIXTY- JOE MADIATH – Toilet training and hygiene lessons for
Orissa’s rural poor
These are subsidized toilets city people would love to use. Joe Madiath
Executive director, Gram Vikas
Gram Vikas has built 2,700 toilets in 361 poor and tribal villages. This
year’s target is another 10,000 B Y P AROMITA S HASTRI
paromita.s@livemint.com
········· S ················ tanding in the middle court of India Habitat
Centre, one of New Del hi’s best laid-out environment-intelligent spaces,
Joe Madiath asks, with a mischievous grin, if we’d rather take him to a
nearby toilet and photograph him there.
That wouldn’t be a bad idea because Madiath is the man who has helped build
the maximum number of toilets in the country, if efforts by the government’s
sanitation departments and Sulabh Shauchalaya, a commercial venture by
Bindeshwar Pathak, are discounted.
And he has built them where it matters-2,700 toilets in 361 very poor and
mainly tribal villages across 21 districts of Orissa. This year’s target is
another 10,000.
The subject of toilets certainly gets 58-year old Madiath going. “Ever seen
the stuff the government builds? A pan, a tank and three walls with a thatch
roof, without a water source. By next monsoon, they’re either stinking,
full, or being used as a shed. Why build a toilet for poor villagers you
yourself can’t use? Aren’t they human beings? Or is it that poor people
don’t deserve anything better?” he asks.
Madiath thinks they do.
The toilets in and around Mohuda village in Berhampur in the Ganjam district
of Oris sa, the headquarters of Madia th’s organization Gram Vikas, are
well-constructed, clean and an integral part of homes.
Each comes with a bathing room and a permanent water line from overhead
tanks. The cost of around Rs3,500 is shared between the family and Gram
Vikas, the latter provid ing external materials such as door, cement, steel
and the pan, and technical support.
“Low-cost doesn’t mean low-quality. These are subsi dized toilets city
people would love to use,” says Madiath, ex ecutive director of Gram Vikas.
Statistics pertaining to toi lets do not paint a very impres sive picture of
India. Accord ing to the 2001 census, 63.6% of India’s 192 million
households do not have toilets (the proportion is 78% in rural areas and 26%
in urban areas). And 54% of the households do not have any drainage
facilities (66% in rural areas and 22% in urban ones).
As compared to this, 68% of the households do not have a television (71% in
rural areas and 36% in urban areas). That means that in rural areas, more
households have televi sions than toilets.
The situation is bad even in relatively richer states such as Haryana.
According to a 2006 report in The Tribune, based on data released by
Haryana’s Directorate of Census, 53% of the households in the state had a
television while only 44.5% had toilets.
Another 2006 report based on census data, this one in the International
Herald Tribune, said that 42% of the house holds in Tamil Nadu, long
considered one of the most progressive states in the coun try, had
televisions and only 14.7% had toilets.
The government does have a programme, Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), that
it launched in 2001, with the aim of improving sanitary conditions in rural
areas.
It gives poor rural families a subsidy of Rs500-Rs1,200 per toilet. That’s
nowhere near what’s required especially because most rural areas lack proper
water and drainage networks. The result is poorly built toilets that people
just stop using after some time.
“When you build a home in the city,” asks Madiath, “how much do you pay for
using the city’s vast drainage and sewerage network? A small tax perhaps.
Why must the poor pay 100%?” According to the Centre for Science and
Environment, a non-governmental organization (NGO), New Delhi’s citizens pay
3% of the cost of distribution of water (through taxes) and Bangalore’s
citizens pay 12%.
Madiath, born into a pros perous family of planters in Kerala, has always
been prickly about poverty. He helped organize the labourers at the family
rubber plantation against his father. Boarding school, the family hoped,
would cure him. It didn’t.
Then, in 1971, as a bright, young student activist from Loyola College,
Chennai, he decided to go to Orissa to help cyclone victims.
And his life changed.
Although it has made rapid strides in recent years by leveraging its mineral
resources to attract companies to invest in the state, Orissa remains one of
India’s poorest states.
According to a 2004-05 data, 86% of its population lives in rural areas; 47%
earns Rs360 a month and 38% belongs to scheduled castes and tribes.
Madiath’s parents were devastated when he decided to stay back at Ganjam,
struck by the terrible poverty around him, and hoping to expand the limited
local economic options for the local people, through better working
techniques and the use of technology. In 1979, he set up Gram Vikas .
“The NGO word had not been coined. As students, we were enamoured by
technology, naively confident that if we could just pour down some technical
support on one end of the tube, development would come out of the other,” he
says. As Madiath discovered, it didn’t.
Gram Vikas’ first experiment was a dairy, which floundered after a while
because the tribals didn’t believe in milking cows. Biogas plants came after
that and saw success.
“The forest was receding at an alarming rate, mainly because of
indiscriminate felling. Most of the families had cows, the slurry was also
good for agriculture, so we could make the omelettes without breaking the
eggs,” says Madiath.
The Deenabandhu biogas plant became a model for a government scheme that
late prime minister Indira Gandhi launched. Gram Vikas has so far set up
55,000 biogas systems to provide inexpensive fuel for villagers.
But it was toilets that made Madiath a name to reckon with in some circles.
In 1992, Madiath came up with a Rural Health and Environment Programme after
a Gram Vikas study found that more than 80% of the deaths in rural Orissa
could be traced to water contaminated by faeces.
The programme seeks to harness all physical and human capital in a village,
while demystifying construction techniques and enhancing local employment by
teaching them brick making and other skills. Every family in a village must
agree to be part of a programme before it can proceed and also must
contribute equally in cash, materials, skill and labour to make a corpus
fund. A committee of 50 people is formed to thrash out all issues and
execute the work, with proportionate representation from women, and each
community and tribe. That’s because if there’s even one family in the
village defecating in the open or using the pond to wash or bathe, it
contaminates the water and affects the health of all. The committee also has
to bring everybody around if caste or community problems surface.
Gram Vikas has used the same approach to build roads, drainage systems,
community halls and schools, under a complete village development programme
called MANTRA. Whenever needed, politicians and government schemes have been
tapped, to ease financial constraints. “Politicians are very people-savvy;
it is the bureaucrats who are resistant to change. But we’re a democracy, so
officials work when we put pressure or when we scrape or prostrate
(ourselves before them),” he says.
The average contribution per family towards a permanent village corpus is
Rs1,000, with more prosperous families sometimes giving more to make up for
the less fortunate. The interest earned by this fund, typically around Rs1-2
lakh a year, is used for maintenance, issue soft loans for specific projects
and help out the deserving if needed-basically to ensure that the village’s
water and sanitation needs are met. There’s a stiff fine for open defecation
or a dirty toilet. “In water and sanitation, the community approach leads to
a win-win situation. You get the village to unite and that allows it to take
up other development issues. Freed from the killing job of fetching water,
women get their children immunized and send them to school and do other
work,” says Madiath.
Acknowledging Gram Vikas’ contribution to the popularization of the TSC,
Orissa rural development secretary S.N. Tripathi says, “The job be comes
much more difficult when you have to work with poor tribals who don’t even
have a decent house. And Rs1,200 isn’t enough to build a proper toilet.
Wherever Joe has taken it up, he has got success.” Madiath admits the
government’s TSC, which even awards villages that have improved their
sanitation facilities, has fared better than any government scheme.
He adds that the real issue, however, has to do with sustainability and
change in attitude towards sanitation.
“Every time one pan is put,” he says, “one tick will be made on the TSC
report card. India will achieve the UN sanitation goal in figures. The
operation will be successful but the patient will be dead. Toilets are just
one part of our essential campaign for dignity and inclusion.” Secondly, he
adds, even if the government meets its target, it is a success only in terms
of fixed-point defecation. “What happens to the remaining 95% of the country
which is used to open defecation?” he asks.
In much of North and NorthWest India, Madiath claims, villagers ritually
drive in their Maruti cars to the fields to relieve themselves.
Nafisa Barot, executive director, Utthan, a voluntary organization working
on issues related to water and sanitation in Gujarat, says that Madiath’s
“singular contribution in the field is in working for the poor from the
rights perspective, even while challenging the existing paradigms of
development with innovative approaches and clearly demonstrated results.”
According to her, Madiath has shown on a very large scale how best the
government machinery can be engaged for the benefit of the people.
Among the many awards Gram Vikas has received are the World Habitat Award
for 2002, the Tech Museum Award 2003, the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize for
2006 and the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship 2007.
“My effort is to create an enabling environment for sustainable development,” says Madiath, “one that makes clear that poor people really do matter.” He doesn’t want to bring his programme to the city slums “where many people (NGOs) are working.” “Nobody is interested in poor tribals,” says Madiath Kumuda Bisoi of Samantarapur village in Puri, where one of the three ponds freed from bathing and washing was given over to women to grow
fish, says her husband had initially grumbled that the women would soon
“wear pants and men, bangles”.
After the ponds made an income of Rs40,000 a year later, she says, he was
smiling.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the
60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to Sixty
Indians-both here and abroad-who are not rich or famous. These are people
who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking
headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place.
We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled
in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to
interview@livemint.com www.livemint.com This is 39th in our Sixty in Sixty
series. The earlier ones are available under the Profiles section of our
website.