Now, Twitter for toilets in India ……..Insiya Amir
Shit is not a dirty word. After all, we spend six months to three years on the toilet seat in a lifetime. It is about time we cut through the crap and give 2.6 billion people on the planet a chance do the same. That’s exactly the aim of Twitter for Sh-tters, which is using the power of the current darling of social networking, Twitter, to raise money for building toilets in India.
The idea is simple. Every day, Twitter users like you and me around the world, are asked to spend the day tweeting to try and get their followers to donate. With every $400 raised, Wherever The Need, an NGO based in the US, UK and India, builds an eco-sanitation toilet for Indians, 660 million of whom still defecate in the open.
Apart from the money raised, the bigger purpose of Twitter for Sh-tters (T4S) is to make people, especially the youth, talk about sanitation, says David Crosweller, UK director of Wherever The Need (WTN). T4S has “daily dumpers’’ who can tweet about “whatever crap they want’’ to take this topic and, pardon the expression, step right into it.
“The thinking behind the T4S campaign was that if we could start young people talking about the benefits of sanitation then, in the mid-term, it may become less of a taboo subject and we may actually be able to start having a sensible debate,’’ explains Crosweller.
And it is more than just talking about toilets. There are 16 different aspects that sanitation and water affect. One of the main concerns is mortality from intestinal illness — Unicef says 1,000 Indian children under five die of diarrhoea and other sanitation-related diseases every day. Sanitation brings other benefits too like general improvement in health, better agricultural output and a massive saving — “India could save at least $3 billion per year by installing eco-sanitation toilets’’ — in national balance of payments.
Shit, it seems, is really serious business. Which is why Dave Prager started blogging about it. What started with Poop Report, “your number one source for your number two business’’, ended as a book published two years ago.
And Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, made an award-winning career by building more than 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people in India since 1973.
Despite these efforts, according to the 2001 Census, only 18% Indians use toilets. About 78.4% of the rural and 13.6% of the urban population still practices open defecation. Remember the famous seen in Slumdog Millionaire where the young protagonist jumps into a swamp of shit? To avoid such scenes in reel and real life, the UN has set a millennium development goal of halving the number of people who currently have no access to basic sanitation facilities by 2015. Will you give a shit?