Editorial from the Telegraph india

AGAINST NATURE

Why does an unmanageable number of Indians urinate and defecate in
public places? Because some Indians — mostly in the villages and urban
slums — have houses that have no toilets. And some, mainly in cities
and towns, have no homes at all. Many in the first category,
especially in rural India, have made a virtue out of this necessity,
and believe that they actually prefer to answer the call of nature as
naturally as possible. But for the homeless, particularly for women
and children, it boils down to a stark absence of choice. All these
realities and factors, geographically and sociologically so varied,
will make it difficult for the Centre to achieve its target to end
public defecation by 2012. (It seems to have forgotten about public
urination altogether, but making it part of the campaign will make
matters more difficult, for perfectly well-off city people will then
have to be toilet-trained too.)

On the part of the State, it will not be enough to spend money on
making toilets for homes and communities, or even to supplement this
with programmes for behavioural change. The function and meaning of
actual — and not just ritual — hygiene will have to be radically
transformed across society. Most of India is used to filth and stench.
Here waste disposal is still in its primitive stages, most of the
public water is contaminated by rusty pipes or leaking sewers (there
is arsenic in the water even in hospitals), and rivers are lethally
dirtied by human waste. City-dwellers routinely walk past women
delivering babies under flyovers, dogs feasting on discarded babies or
sick people rotting quietly in garbage vats. So convincing people to
change their habits of cleanliness for the sake of others will be a
tough job here, to say the least. People keep themselves and their
surroundings clean for two reasons. First, if they feel good about
themselves, and second, if they feel that those they share public
spaces with feel good about them too. Most of the homeless in India
cannot imagine either. The transition from ritual purity to actual
hygiene, or from policed hygiene to natural cleanliness, is not simply
a matter of making toilets or imposing fines, although these would be
steps in the right direction.