by Rose George
Anthropologists think disgust is learned. They point to small children who show no disgust at dirt or feces until they are educated otherwise. The anthropologist Mary Douglas concluded that something is dirty because it is out of place. Soil in the garden is fine; soil on a plate is not. Disgust becomes a way of ordering a society, of creating a hierarchy of what is safe and what is acceptable. It also becomes a way of distancing intellectual humans from their embarrassingly animal origins. John Berger, in an essay for Harper’s Magazine about cleaning his outhouse, concluded that “what makes shit such a universal joke is that it’s an unmistakable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and of our will to glory. It is the ultimate lèse-majesté.”
None of the theories seemed to hold true in Mosmoil. For reasons of convenience and habit—they had no latrines, so they had to go somewhere—the villagers had suppressed disgust. Kar thought the only way they would change is if they did it themselves. It is difficult, he writes in his guide, to break the entrenched habit of development professionals, to resist being the omniscient outsider coming into the village and dispensing instruction and free latrines. But it was crucial. Any awareness had to be revelation, not instruction. From within, not top-down.
In Mosmoil, after the fecal calculation, people started vomiting from the shock. Then Kar did something more shocking still. He left them to it, or threatened to. “I said, ‘Carry on what you’re doing. Your forefathers did it; you can do it. Good-bye.’” The story as Kar tells it is suspiciously dramatic, but enough reports have been written on the Bangladesh program that I believe him. Immediately, he says, the villagers were fired up with shame and disgust and determination. Children ran off to start digging latrine pits on the spot. The villagers swore that within two months “not a single fellow would still be shitting in the open.” All this took place without a penny of subsidy being dispensed. No latrines had been supplied, no technical advice. Kar believes that once disgust has been triggered, villagers may say they can’t afford a pit latrine. At that point, the facilitator can suggest a simple, low-cost design, emphasizing that it was created by poor people. Kar wanted to shift the focus away from hardware. It didn’t matter, he believed, if latrines were temporary. People would upgrade if they needed to. Once they’d seen the light of disgust they would do whatever was necessary.
Kar went back to his hotel after a day in Mosmoil with the makings of a new methodology that apparently worked. He came to call it Community-Led Total Sanitation, or CLTS. Community-led, because it was not about outsiders imposing things on insiders. Total Sanitation, because it kept the 100 percent requirement of the Gram Vikas and TSC models. In Bangladesh, where WaterAid had good local partners, and where the population density made people receptive to a private latrine, its success spread fast.
In India, where development experts were sick of seeing their expensively provided latrines standing unused, and tired of seeing those “bare bottoms doing what they must,” CLTS looked like a ray of hope. Kar initially refused to try it in his home country. India’s huge bureaucracy meant that there were too many government meddlers to interfere with things at village level. Bangladesh had nothing and its people had nothing. It was easier to persuade people to do things for themselves. In India, too much money was still being thrown at sanitation. People had gotten dependent on subsidy. They saw the next village getting subsidized latrines, and preferred to wait their turn for handouts rather than build their own. Kar told his countrymen that CLTS would never work in India. Eventually, thanks to persistent persuasion from a man at the Water and Sanitation Program’s Delhi office, he changed his mind.
Kar invites me to Dharamsala, where he’s running a CLTS workshop. Dharamsala, the involuntary home of the Dalai Lama, is one of the most popular tourist spots in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. Tourists come here to see Tibetans or mountains, but it’s lucky they don’t come to see toilets because they wouldn’t find many. Himachal Pradesh’s sanitation statistics are woeful. Eighty percent of people do open defecation. The state government has therefore decided to initiate CLTS statewide. HP is a test case for CLTS, and the Dharamsala workshop will train the people who will make it a success.
The training is held in an unheated hall. The temperature outside is near freezing, but I’m the only one feeling the cold. Everyone else is making up for the lack of heating with passion, energy, and woolen Himalayan shawls. The attendees are a mix: hygiene workers; women from self-help groups; ordinary villagers. They have spent the previous day learning the basics of CLTS. Don’t tell, always ask. Awaken disgust. Use crude language. Never, ever promise anything. They are enthusiastic, itching to try it out, so a village is assigned to each of five groups, and off they go.
Kar and I set off in pursuit, but logistics intervene—in the first village, there’s nobody around to test the method on, and it takes too long to get to the second. I arrive in a small settlement outside Dharamsala to find villagers who have already been “triggered.” On the ground by the village office, there are still traces of the yellow chalk outline of the map. And two handsome men, with cheekbones as sharp as the mountaintops, are standing on a path nearby, looking somewhat bemused, with a backdrop of the Himalayas.
In one man’s hand is the paper on which villagers have done their fecal calculations. “It was ten truckloads of shit a year,” he says, and holds up a sheet of paper with figures written on it: 274 kg per day, 8,220 kg per month, 98,640 kg per year. That sounds like a lot, I say. They nod. “People didn’t have any understanding until the outsiders came, and that’s when we realized, what the hell are we doing?” I ask them what changed their mind, and the older man says, “When this guy picked up a hair and touched some shit and dipped it in a glass of water and asked if we would drink it now—that was really shocking. Also they brought some food and we saw that the flies were flying between the food and the shit. That was horrifying. It was only a short hair but flies have six legs.”
He’s referring to my favorite part of the triggering process. Facilitators who do the transect walk can, if they choose, surreptitiously remove some feces from the open defecation areas and bring it back to the meeting point. There, they will place it next to a plate of food—a chapati bread or rice will do—and say nothing. Flies will soon arrive and fly between the two, and eventually someone will notice. It is a strikingly effective way of communicating contamination. There are other techniques, often devised by the “natural leaders” who sometimes emerge during the triggering. One Bangladeshi villager thought up the phrase “a fly is deadlier than a thousand tigers,” now a slogan nationwide.
That’s homegrown communication. CLTS also breeds homegrown innovation. On his laptop, Kar has dozens of photos of latrine-building ingenuity, where villagers have used what’s readily available in place of expensive equipment. There’s a latrine pan made from a cement pipe cut in half; pipes made from plastic soft-drink bottles; walls of tin or tarpaulin. Once a village has been ignited, CLTS facilitators give some training in building a safe latrine pit, siting it a safe distance from watercourses, but beyond that, it’s up to the villagers. This approach infuriates some engineers and public health specialists, who worry about groundwater contamination from poorly sited latrines, or who say that latrine building is a specialist affair. Kar has no patience with this.
Sanitation experts talk about a “sanitation ladder,” where people begin with the poorest safe containment option and move on up to the flush toilet. The latrine gets upgraded like a mobile phone. For Kar, these low-tech, flexibly designed latrines are a new first step on the ladder. He is convinced that people will maintain and upgrade them because self-motivation is more sustainable than anything else. He proves this point by taking me to a warehouse in a city outside Kolkata, where an innovative local government chairman is trying to make his municipality the only urban area in India where CLTS is working. In Kar’s terminology, “the only city in India that can claim that no bloody fellow is defecating anywhere.”
Kalyani, two hours west of Kolkata, has fifty-two slums in its jurisdiction. This is no black hole: these slums are classed as “peri-urban.” They are spacious, with trees and banana plantations, and good-sized shacks. But they are still illegally squatted and infrastructural services are minimal. Toilets are either nonexistent or unused.
In the town hall yard, Kar opens a garage door and points. There is a pile of latrine slabs, manufactured by Milon Nag in his Pune plastics factory, and costing an affordable 120 rupees ($3) each. Kar ordered 1,000 and expected them to be snapped up after CLTS had been done in Kalyani’s slums. He came back to find that only 21 had been bought. “No one wanted them. They wanted something better.” As Gram Vikas knew, toiletlessness is not always about poverty. Kar tells the tale of a wealthy farmer in Haryana. “He would take his whole family out in the morning for open defecation, in his nice Maruti car. They would shit in the bush and come back in the car. It’s the whole mental thing!”
Our visit is hosted by two female doctors. Dr. Shibani Goswami works for Kolkata’s Urban Services for the Poor (KUSP), which is attempting to implant sanitation and good hygiene in the greater Kolkata area. KUSP has a substantial budget, so it gives out generous subsidies—9,900 rupees ($200) for a latrine. Kar scorns it. But he likes Dr. Goswami because she thinks 9,900 rupee subsidies never work either. Dr. Kasturi Bakshi, meanwhile, works for the municipality. They seat us at a long meeting table, on chairs whose backs are covered by towels to accommodate sweaty councillors. On the wall, there is a series of red, yellow, and green cards, each with a passport photo, a name, and some figures. This is the Kalyani wall of shame.
CLTS relies on manipulating emotions to work. Disgust is the first, but then come shame and pride. Villagers are encouraged to boast about their ODF status. They put up posters—No one defecates in the open in this village!—and crow to their relatives. It’s supposed to foster competition and usually does. The wall is designed to achieve a similar result. Each card represents a local councillor. Each local councillor is responsible for so many slums, and each color represents how many slums are now open defecation–free. It’s fabulous and, says Dr. Bakshi, it works brilliantly. “When councillors come in here, the first thing they do is check the board. ‘Oh god, I’m still in the red.’ There is no need to say anything.”
We take the municipality’s ambulance to Vidyasagar Colony in Ward 5, one of the first slums to be triggered. The colony has wide sandy streets and walls decorated with cow patties slapped against them to dry. Our first stop is at the residence of a widow. Sandhya Barui is sixty years old. She came to West Bengal from Bangladesh thirty years ago and she’s been living in this slum ever since. Her place looks quite nice. She has a decent shack, adequate space, and a sturdy latrine that she built herself. Even the pit. She’s a frail, skinny woman, but she’s stronger than she looks.
It’s not a sophisticated latrine—a cheap plastic pan, sheltered by walls and a roof of bamboo, banana leaves, and plastic—but it is swept and obviously used and prized. Behind Barui’s shack is her old toilet, a field of bananas whose leaves never grew tall enough to hide her from peering children. They would come and look at you, says the widow, and laugh at you while you squatted. It was sinful. Also, someone in her family got diarrhea at least once a month. She spent 100 rupees ($2.50) a month on medicine. “To us, even if we lose five paise [less than a tenth of a cent], that’s a lot of money.” Nonetheless, she spent 700 rupees on her latrine and she thinks it has been worth every paise.
The widow’s pleasure in her latrine is infectious, and I understand why she’s a standard stop on the CLTS tour. But her latrine still constitutes a risk because her shack is technically illegal. In fact, when the slum was declared open defecation–free, the mayor faced a problem. He wanted to reward the colony, but he couldn’t give them title to their illegally occupied land, as the slum dwellers wanted. He couldn’t give them anything, either, that might be construed as conferring land rights, like electricity. Instead, he gave them three solar streetlights, now the only street illumination in the whole slum.
We stand in front of a lamppost, facing a large map tacked to a shack that displays which residents have built latrines and where. Our guides are a quartet of young local men. They are the natural leaders—the most persuasive and articulate villagers—who arose out of the triggering process. Natural leadership is now their job. Their task is to trigger CLTS in nearby slums, and for each house trigger, they are paid 100 rupees. They tell us that they’ve just completed a village of 37 houses. Kar is practically jumping up and down with pleasure. “Thirty-seven hundred rupees! Oh my God! That’s big money!”
The young men no doubt deserve the reward. They have got results. But triggering is a delicate process, and it can go very wrong. I see this on the third day of the Dharamsala workshop, when the five groups have to report back on the success of their triggering the day before. Kar gives the volunteers his categories of success. Proper ignition is “a matchbox in a gas station.” Partial ignition and some cause for hope is “fire under ashes,” because something is smoldering. Next comes, simply, “hope.” The worst is a damp matchbox.
Each team stands up and delivers its report to the hall. Kar mostly keeps his counsel, even when Group 2, for example, delivers a soaking wet matchbox. People in their assigned village hadn’t been warned and hardly anyone was around. The trainees had used a crude word for “shit,” and women had gotten embarrassed and covered their faces. The fecal calculation was done all right, but then the trainees asked villagers how much fecal contamination they ingested. Well, none, said the villagers.
The young trainee presenting the report looks embarrassed. “Then we said, how much contamination do the dogs bring in and they said they didn’t have dogs, but we could hear them in the village. When we asked about the source of water, they said it came from a place with no contamination. When we asked about flies, they said, ‘We have no flies.’ ”
By this point most of the workshop is laughing and not all of it is in sympathy. Other groups do better. They get the required disgust and promises. Some of their members may even become natural leaders. Some already have. At the end of the day, a thin-faced man wearing a baseball cap approaches me. He is bursting to tell his story. His name is Mansingh Kapoor, and he works for the Natural Environment and Health Association in Palampur. He is an educated man whose job requires him to know—and care—about hygiene. He says, “I want to tell you that yesterday I was doing open defecation but today I have stopped.” He has had a latrine for five years and never used it because “we have had the habit of open defecation for one hundred years. It’s nice to go out and sit by a river in nature.” But now he’s had his CLTS epiphany. He will start using his latrine on Monday. And, if Kar’s theory of contagion works, he will convince other people to do something about it.
The contagion theory holds that if CLTS doesn’t work in one village, then you leave and start on another one nearby. A film about CLTS made by the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) shows a young bride sitting in a room. Her sari is red; her attitude is demure. Two men enter and hand her a latrine pan. “There have been instances,” the narrator explains, “where health motivators were seen gifting latrine slabs to brides. This ensured the bride not only continued to practice safe sanitation in her new village but also set an example for her new neighbors.” If you can’t find a husband with a toilet, take one with you.
CLTS is seductive. The results, when they occur, are visible and relatively immediate. Not everyone is persuaded. Monitoring so far has been scanty. Indian journalists who followed up villages that had won a Nirmal Gram Open Defecation–Free award returned a year later to find dirty, unused latrines and open defecation still going on.
Also, CLTS might flounder after the first low-tech pits collapse. Kar answers that with an anecdote about a man at a Bangladeshi meeting, where engineers presented their new low-cost latrine which cost 300 taka ($4) and had taken them years to develop. “The
n this old man got up and said he’d built one for ten taka. They said, ‘But ours last for ten years!’ and the man laughed. ‘I change my roof every two years. Why not my toilet?’”