Gratitude to Ancestors

‘Pitru-Paksha’, homage to ancestors performed as a ritual during a certain period every year, reminds us to express our gratitude to our elders and lighten our burden of any debts we feel we owe to them for not having given thanks earlier. A high gratitude quotient is the hallmark of inner growth. Karna, in the epic Mahabharata, remained eternally grateful to his benefactor Duryodhana. For a single act of saving him from humiliation, Karna was always thankful; he even paid back with his own life. Remembering the goodness of others and sending positive vibes towards them are natural processes of pure minds. Divinity graces such hearts that have embraced prayerful gratitude. Ancestors symbolise the past. Past modified in time, is the present. Present being an extension of the past, cannot be separated from it. Therefore, remaining grateful to all those who came into our lives, including the lineage, teachers, friends, institutions, situations, struggles and opportunities — and also remembering their contributions to our lives — contribute greatly to making our lives total and holistic. To quote Thunchath Ezhuthachan, a 14th-century Malayalam devotional poet, “The one who forgets his debt content is dead, though alive.” The shradh ceremony institutionalised once a year, however, is indicative of having such a grateful heart all the time. It is an opportunity for remembrance and reflection, and feeling thankful to our ancestors. Pitru Paksha is being observed from September 24 and concludes on October 9.

Source: Economic Times, 5/10/2018

The scope of constitutional morality

Abolition of untouchability in all its forms, including scavenging, remains an unrealised constitutional right

“The issue of the rights of sweepers and scavengers has never entered the mainstream legal consciousness in the country,” wrote Upendra Baxi in Law and Poverty: Critical Essays . “Nor have the Bar and the Bench, and the mushrooming legal aid and advice programmes shown any awareness of the exploitative conditions of work imposed upon the scavengers and sweepers under the employment of municipal corporations or related local bodies… [T]he exploitative conditions of work constitute governmental defiance of the law and the Constitution, which can be best summed up as a crucial component of overall governmental lawlessness in the country since Independence.”

Written in 1988, Prof. Baxi’s lines remain disconcertingly relevant today. We struggle against the caricaturing of this extremely stigmatising, violently exploitative and degrading form of forced labour by a government and civil society that showcases empty rhetoric and ceremony around “cleanliness”, while decimating an entire class of citizens through callous neglect with impunity.

There has been a steady rise in deaths of conservancy workers, and a steadier normalisation of the risks to life they bear on a daily basis. Why don’t sewer deaths bring the country to a grinding halt, as they should? Will a general strike of all conservancy workers across the country bring the country to its knees? Because then, it will not be a question of prime-time jingles on a clean India; the focus will shift on each of us to take the moral and physical responsibility of cleaning our own sewers and keeping ourselves free of the risk of toxic death.

Flouting laws

To return to Prof. Baxi’s concerns on the place of law: Article 17 of the Constitution of India states: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.” This is a fundamental right and therefore justiciable and enforceable by courts, which shall call governments to account.

In 2009, the Delhi High Court, in Naz Foundation v. NCT of Delhi , invoked Babasaheb Ambedkar’s delineation of constitutional morality in asserting the urgency of decriminalising consensual sexual relations proscribed by Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The court cited a second provision as well: Article 15(2) which prohibits any form of horizontal discrimination drawing again from the experience of untouchability that obstructed the universal use of public places, restaurants, water sources, etc. We witnessed last month a triumphal return of constitutional morality as a guiding principle for constitutional interpretation. A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India , deployed this framework to reaffirm the rights of LGBTQ and all gender non-conforming people to their dignity, life, liberty, and identity.

The genealogy of Ambedkar’s signposting of constitutional morality may be traced to the strength of anti-caste resistance and the abolition of untouchability. It is from this context that constitutional wisdom was applied to analogous situations of oppressions based on sexuality. It is time to call the government to account through a recursive method that takes us to the original constitutional proscription of untouchability, armed with the wisdom of the Navtej Singh Johar case.

Judicial empathy

The first aspect is the importance of judicial empathy. In a violently exclusionary society, the application of the Constitution to lives as lived is an extremely emotional moment. We have people from India’s most oppressed castes dying painful deaths without dignity in the sewers of the same city where the court sits. There is neither accountability nor due diligence on the part of the state. The time for the expression of judicial empathy is now. Justice Indu Malhotra’s lines in Johar are apposite: “History owes an apology to the members of this community and their families, for the delay in providing redressal for the ignominy and ostracism that they have suffered through the centuries.”

Given the urgency, with people dying daily despite constitutional and statutory protections, how do we right these historical wrongs, or at least “set the course for the future”? We are all agreed that the de minimis approach is bad law — rule by law rather than rule of law, as it should be, to echo Justice D.Y. Chandrachud. The fact that it is still possible for people to be sent into sewers without protection, and to be forced to perform degrading labour is enough for us to sit up and take note. Outgoing Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra set out four cardinal corners of the Constitution: Individual autonomy and liberty; equality sans discrimination; recognition of identity with dignity; right to privacy. He also underscored the centrality of fraternity to the constitutional value system. These signposts require us to contemplate and act on the meanings and expressions of “intrinsic dignity” for conservancy workers and safai karamcharis.

If “self-determination and the realisation of one’s own abilities” lie at the core of personhood, how would forced, unsafe and degrading labour, and persistent untouchability figure in this new constitutional imaginary? In the case of safai karamcharis, we are today witness to the “violation of fundamental rights that strikes at the root of their existence” (Justice Misra), and there are no visible pathways to freedom in this virulent caste society. Lest we forget, untouchability is a crime under the Constitution.

Principle of non-retrogression

Important for citizen consideration today is the fact that the Supreme Court, in deciding on the unconstitutionality of Section 377, recognised that the four corners of the Constitution rest on a social reality steeped in prejudice, stereotypes, parochialism, bigotry, social exclusion, and segregation. If decriminalising “unnatural” sex is one of the “necessary steps on the road to democracy”, abolition of untouchability in all its forms remains an unrealised constitutional right.

The lesson on the importance of intersections in constitutional reasoning today is brought home to us in this case in yet another way. There is recognition by the court that majoritarian governments/sections work hard to keep oppressive structures in place, and that it is the duty of the court to place questions of liberty, equality, and dignity out of the reach of majoritarian impulses. The sanction for manual scavenging lies at the heart of majoritarian mindsets and structures. It is part of an ideological framework that permeates the institutional apparatus of government. If, as Justice Misra observes, “the sustenance of fundamental rights does not require majoritarian sanction”, can we call for some constitutional-procedural deliberation on the “progressive realisation of rights” in this instance? The principle of non-retrogression in the matter of fundamental rights has now been unequivocally stated. But on our streets, we only observe it in the breach especially in the case of manual scavengers.

To end with Ambedkar: “We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy.”

Kalpana Kannabiran is Professor and Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad

Source: The Hindu, 4/10/18

The Uncovered Last Mile

Policymakers need to ask why programmes for farmers do not reach them.

Two policy issues remain a flea in my ear and I keep reiterating them in my column. The first is: Does the money we aim to spend on farmers reach the intended beneficiaries? Alternately, do markets give them advantages on their harvest? The second is: Does the money we spend on infrastructure for farmers lead to greater opportunities for them? Both are serious issues. If there were easy solutions to these issues, as many politicians often claim, the exploitation of the farming community would have stopped long ago.

When I worked with the government, I had a habit which I had picked up as a very young chairman of the Agricultural Price Commission (now called the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices). The agriculture ministry’s data office collects information about the prices of several crops in mandis across the country. This data is constantly improved, the last time based on the recommendations of a committee I was privileged to chair. I always hunt for “price quotes” below the MSP. I can track this only through financial newspapers — topical price quotes are made available only to policy makers every morning and I am not one of them. Some of the language papers are particularly good at giving such information.

So, if you looked at them with a trained eye, you might, for instance, get to know that moong was selling at one-third to two-fifth below the MSP at centres in Karnataka. This started in Bellary and then spread like wildfire to many districts. Local officials kept pleading with the central agencies to intervene. But many of the latter did not have the funds. The high MSP declared with the intention of covering 50 per cent additional over costs made their life more difficult, as funding had to be spread thin.

The problem spread to adjoining districts in Maharashtra. The trader was making a killing in the agricultural markets. He had the money and knew that when the agencies get the money, he would supply them moong. The same problem hit cultivators of tur, a staple in Western India. Here, again, there were widespread reports of sales below the declared prices.

My next story pertains to another baby of my mine: The Sardar Sarovar Project. The Sardar, whose statue the prime minister will unveil on behalf of a grateful nation, was a very practical man — as the Bardoli Agitation showed. He asked Pattabhi Sitaramayya to conduct a study of the Talala taluka to work out how the colonial state was exploiting the poor. Being a statistician type, I get such studies done periodically. This means we have data for over three quarters of a century for that one block.

But apart from having a towering statue, about which the Sardar may laugh, he would want to know how the delivery of water from the Narmada is progressing. It’s been 16 years since water was diverted into the main canal, which I know is an engineering marvel, because I designed it. A branch canal in the Sardar Sarovar System is, in many cases, bigger than most main canals of irrigation projects in India and abroad.

But the kisan does not benefit from the work that we have done. Since he does not get the water, the farmer sometimes pumps it out from the branches and sub-branches of the canals — and when he is caught, he goes to jail. But 57 per cent of the minor canals are yet to be constructed and the poor farmer has no choice. He can construct the field channels — the gracious government has told him that they will do it for him, but almost a third of them have not been constructed. The endeavour will be completed in a year, it has been said. I genuinely believe with determined effort, that is possible. We have done such things in the past. The great Sardar will be happy if we do so.

Written by Yoginder K. Alagh

Source: Indian Express, 4/10/18

CAT 2018: How to ace data interpretation and logical reasoning section?

In the last two years, the data interpretation and logical reasoning (DI-LR) section in the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) has sandbagged the scores of many a test-taker; thus making its mark as the most difficult of the three sections of the test.

In the last two years, the data interpretation and logical reasoning (DI-LR) section in the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) has sandbagged the scores of many a test-taker; thus making its mark as the most difficult of the three sections of the test. A major reason is the unpredictability associated with DILR—not knowing what is going to unfold this time around. For instance, instead of the traditional sets that had appeared till CAT 2015, of late, the section has been rife with puzzle-type questions with no clear distinction between LR and DI sets.

The ‘IIM dollar’ question: How does one prepare for DILR

Before identifying a preparation strategy, it’s important to pinpoint what DILR focuses on. The section tests you on two things only:

• Common sense; and your ability to apply it

• Can you stay calm under pressure? Basically, it’s like a top-order batsman batting with a tailender. Can he soak all the pressure; and pick and choose the bowler and delivery to take advantage of? Similarly, can you keep your cool; and tell yourself that it’s a test of just 12-14 questions!

Thus, the first change one needs to make is to view LRDI not as a section of 8 sets, but as a 32-question ball-game. And the first step would be to convince yourself to not try and attempt everything. Herein starts the process of unlearning.

The next step is to identify opportunities to encash. Just like the batsman in our example chooses the bowler and delivery he wants to capitalize on, similarly, you need to spot the sets you want to attempt, as well as the questions in those sets you should attempt first. To do this, follow a 3-step thumb rule:

Step 1: Spend the first 10 minutes of the section skimming through all the sets. While doing so, don’t just go through the mother data, but also look at the questions. Those starting with ‘If’ and those that include ‘Cannot be Determined’ (CBD) in their options are signalling you to leave them alone. Identify the priority (order) in which you would want to pick up the sets— based on familiarity and comfort.

Step 2: Remember that you are a human being – yes, that’s critical! Implication? Well, not being able to solve a question is no big deal. However, how quickly you identify such questions, and move on is definitely a big deal! Ideally, you should be able to spot a not-to-attempt set in about 4-5 minutes. Just tell yourself it was a corker of a delivery; but you survived, and tired the bowler out.

Step 3: Keep in mind that it’s not about solving all questions from a particular set, but about solving the easiest ones—14-16 questions, to be precise. That can be achieved by identifying 4 sets, wherein you solve almost all questions; or, solving around 2 questions from each of the 8 sets.

Do’S

• Start with attempting 8 questions with 100% accuracy

• Thereafter, push the 8 questions to 12

• Take Mocks regularly

• Analyze each Mock thoroughly

• Prioritize accuracy over attempts

Dont’s

• Prepare from offline material 
• Fear the section
• Miss out on analyzing Mocks
•Feel obligated to attempt more sets in the time remaining
• In the actual exam, as per the trends in the last few years, an attempt of 12-14 questions is 3/8th of the paper. So, with 100% accuracy you will score 40-42 marks, which, in return, will get you close to a 97-98%ile+. The key, as mentioned, is to keep it simple. Follow the thumb rule; and formulate your exam-day strategy. Keep time aside to go through the question paper; and choose the sets which you would be attempting. Remember, time is precious; waste it wisely!

(The author is group product head, Career Launcher. Views expressed here are personal)

Source: Hindustan Times, 3/10/18

With new sanitation policies, toilets are fast moving from being a privilege to being a right

While the progress made in the past three years is indeed heartening, there is much work to be done, especially in urban India.

The six-legged fly, a vector of the faecal-oral route transmission, was the cause of many socio-economic problems in India. Over one lakh children annually succumb to diseases spread by the fly and its vector brethren, primarily due to diarrhoea. Open defecation is the prime cause. For more years than we can count, more than half the people of India, a country of diverse people, cultures and faiths, have faced an unusually unifying question every morning: Where do I squat to answer nature’s call today? In our country of paradoxes, the contrast between being a rising global superpower and having one of the finest demographic dividend on the one hand, and the challenge of one-fourth of our population not having access to sanitation in the form of toilets or sewage treatment systems on the other hand is sadly striking.

The launch of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) from the ramparts of the Red Fort on August 15, 2014, was a clarion call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who no doubt has the conviction and the commitment to make India clean and healthy. The programme had excellent early success, with India moving from 37% sanitation coverage in 2014 to 67% safe sanitation by 2016.

A programme of this scale cannot become a success with merely a push from the top, critical though this is. Currently, the country is home to about 4.5 lakh Swachhagrahis, or foot soldiers, spreading the message of sanitation. Over the years, initiatives such as Swachh Sankalp se Swachh Siddhi, Freedom from Open Defecation Week, Satyagraha se Swachhagraha, Swachh Bharat Summer Internship and Swachhata Hi Seva (SHS) are some of the SBM programs that have propelled the programme into a citizen’s movement. This year, SHS 2018, organised by the ministry of drinking water and sanitation, is looking to reinforce the message of a jan-andolan (citizen’s movement). In the SHS 2017 campaign, an estimated 10 crore Indians had participated to make India clean in just a fortnight.

This year, the SHS campaign commenced on September 15 and will run up to October 2 to coincide with the beginning of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations. The campaign will engage government bodies, sportspersons, faith leaders, media persons, the corporate sector and their employees, political leaders, school students, youth, pensioners and Swachhagrahis contributing to the cause of Swachhata. India Sanitation Coalition (ISC) is taking the Swaachta Doot programme, originally conceived and implemented by Hindustan Unilever, to other companies across the country. This is a worker-volunteer programme in which factory employees are the messengers of change.

While the progress made in the past three years is indeed heartening, there is much work to be done, especially in urban India. The large scale migration of our rural population into urban areas has resulted in the mushrooming of slums, with an estimated 15-20% of our population residing in slums where the lack of space makes the provision of individual or even community toilets difficult. In cooperation with the Urban Local Bodies, some corporations have made efforts to alleviate this issue. A good example of this is the Suvidha facility put up by Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) in Ghatkopar (Maharashtra) as also the Sulabh International’s pay and use model. Swachh Bharat Mission has worked to build consensus toward a collaborative plan to tackle the sanitation challenge. Unprecedented efforts like Swachh Iconic Places, Swachhata Action Plan, Swachhata Pakhwada, engagement of companies, public sector undertakings, development partners, non-profit organisations and media have helped unite many for a common goal.

To harness the collaborative power of NGOs, development partners, corporations, donors and the government, a few of us started the India Sanitation Coalition in 2015. We have encouraged, hand-held corporations to embrace sanitation, and spend Corporate Social Responsibility funds in support of the country’s sanitation agenda . With a multi-stakeholder approach, a specific thrust has been made to promote the entire value chain of sanitation, based on our BUMT (build, use, maintain and treat) model that addresses not just the building and usage of toilets, but also the treatment of waste generated. Corporations are playing a key role in a wide spectrum of sanitation themes, right from the creation of innovative infrastructure (Havells) to skills development (Kohler, Reckitt Benckiser), behaviour change advocacy (IL&FS, HUL) as well as community engagement. Reckitt Benckiser’s behaviour-change communication specifically through the ‘Dettol — Banega Swachh India’ campaign needs special mention.

Many companies have supported toilets in schools. Some of these best practices are covered in greater detail in my book, Survive or Sink, which presents a holistic approach to the many challenges and opportunities in sustainable development in India and provides recommendations on aspects that need to be considered for the next level of sanitation initiatives or Swachhata 2.0.

With everyone making sanitation their responsibility, the mission is expected to extend to a sustainable open defecation free status for the country. While the progress on the ODF front is resounding, Swachhata 2.0 will need to address the complex issue of urban sanitation. With nearly 75% of the faecal waste (which carries pathogens and disease-carrying bacteria) remains untreated, and finds their way into drains, lakes and rivers, they pose a serious risk to health and overall productivity of the country.

In its newer avatar, the sanitation journey for our country will need to address sustainability with a clear mandate to all sanitation stakeholders. We need to go beyond the building of toilets, and invest in upstream areas of the BUMT chain, especially in faecal waste treatment. If we do not tackle treatment of faecal sludge, we would have embarked on one of the most expensive exercises in history to remove it from our fields by funnelling it into toilets and then dumping it right back into our fields.

With new sanitation policies under the Swachh Bharat Mission, its focus on ODF sustainability, inter-sectoral collaboration and quality without compromising on scale and speed, toilets are fast moving from being a privilege to being a right. And the image of the six-legged fly is now overshadowed by the image of the Late Kunwar Bai (who passed away earlier this year at the age of 106 years), who was felicitated by Prime Minister Modi for building toilets in Rajnandgaon by selling off her goats, and is the real Swachh Bharat Abhiyan mascot.

So, let us celebrate much that has been achieved even as we continue on our journey to achieve ODF status for the country.

Naina Lal Kidwai is Chair, India Sanitation Coalition

Source: Hindustan Times, 3/10/18

The Final Gateway To Enlightenment

 Sanyasa, renunciation, is a concept central to the Bhagwad Gita. The image that comes to mind is a person in ochre robes who has given up wealth and family, abandoned duties and responsibilities, and retired to the Himalayas. In the sixth chapter of the Gita, Krishna defines a sanyasi as one who does what one ought to do, fulfils one’s duties and responsibilities fully, without depending on the fruit of action. A sanyasi is not one who does not have a higher ideal, nor is he an inactive person. Sanyasa is the essential prerequisite to meditation and realisation. There are four types of people. The vast majority belong to the bhogi category. Their only mission is to enjoy the world. They believe you only live once and must indulge in the senses to maximise enjoyment. They are outward-looking and seek objects of desire. A small minority understand that life is more than mere sense indulgence. They look inward and upward to find deeper and more meaningful avenues for happiness. Of these, the spiritual initiates are yogis who still have desires for the world but strive for happiness within. As they shed desires through karma yoga, path of service; bhakti yoga, path of devotion; and jnana yoga, path of knowledge, they become sanyasis who are knocking at the doors of enlightenment. They have few, sublime desires – for freedom, to serve humanity and repay their guru-guide. They only need to meditate to overcome the last hurdle to enlightenment. Meditation is the highest spiritual technique that needs to be practised diligently and devotedly by qualified practitioners. The essential prerequisite for meditation is a calm mind. A mind burdened with desire and attachment is unable to take off into subtler realms. Step by step, Krishna takes us through the preparatory disciplines for meditation. He also gives the disqualifications for meditation. This is followed by the test of enlightenment. A realised soul feels one with all beings. A body-conscious person sees only physical things. An emotional person looks for kindness, affection and gentleness in people. An intellectual looks for clarity of thought. And a spiritual person sees Atman everywhere. He goes beyond worldly differences and sees all beings as reflections of himself. In the end, he experiences God in every living being. Arjuna, like us, is afraid of leaving the safe confines of his present existence to discover the unknown realm of the Infinite. He asks Krishna – what is the fate of those who commit themselves to spiritual life but die before realisation? Krishna says, “One who is righteous will never come to grief. Either now or in the future.” Your efforts will not go in vain. You will carry forward the credits to your future life. A spiritually evolved person who falls short of realisation will either be born in the home of the happy and wealthy or in the family of wise yogis. There, endowed with the wisdom acquired in previous lives, he will strive even more to attain enlightenment. Among all yogis, one who worships with a pure heart and clear intellect, who maintains the goal at all times and strives consistently, is most united. Thus any person, literate or illiterate, elite or commoner, irrespective of caste, race or background, is assured of the ultimate state of infinite happiness.

Source: Times of India, 4/10/18

‘Swachh Bharat has become a people’s movement’

It has brought about behavioural change, empowered women and broken caste barriers, says the Secretary to the Drinking Water and Sanitation Ministry

In his office, Parameswaran Iyer keeps a countdown calendar to October 2, 2019, the deadline for all of India to become ‘open-defecation free’. On Tuesday, the countdown dipped to ‘365 days left’. Despite some aberrations, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan-Gramin has taken massive strides towards its goal. But Mr. Iyer knows that his biggest test will come after the countdown reaches zero: sustaining the gains will be the toughest challenge, he says. Excerpts:

You’re completing four years of the Swachh Bharat programme. What do you think has been its single biggest achievement? And what was the biggest challenge?

First, the fact that this programme has really caught on as a jan andolan . It has become a ‘people’s movement’. It has captured the imagination of the country. It has addressed centuries-old practices on open defecation, and it has had major health and economic impact. A recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report has said that by the time Swachh Bharat ends in 2019, more than 3,00,000 lives would have been saved.

We have got the numbers: 24 States have become open-defecation free. The number of toilets built is 8.6 crore. Sanitation coverage has gone up from 39% when we started four years ago to over 93% today. What is even more significant is that, according to the most recent independent survey, as part of a World Bank-supported project, the usage of the toilets is 93%.

That really shows that this whole behavioural change programme that is at the heart of Swachh Bharat — there is evidence that it is really working. Behavioural change at scale — I think that was the biggest challenge.

So you are saying that it is not just about building the infrastructure, the toilets.

We are very clear that this programme is primarily about changing behaviour. Now, obviously you need the infrastructure. We are trying to separate human contact with excreta and the most cost-efficient way of doing that is by providing a toilet. They have to be built, and there has been a remarkable increase in the number of toilets. But we are more interested in toilet usage.

We deploy tools at two levels. One is [through] mass media, the other [through] interpersonal communication. We have been working on developing an army of foot soldiers called swachhagrahi s, grass-root level motivators trained in community approaches and they go out to trigger behavioural change. They get their communities to accept responsibility and accountability. That ground game, that interpersonal communication, is important not just to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status, but also to sustain it.

You now have 24 States which have been declared ODF, which means that the infrastructure game is supposedly over. They have constructed the toilets...

And they’re being used.

How about behavioural change? Do you continue to work on that in these States?

You have touched upon a very important point: sustaining the gains of ODF. This is one of the biggest differences between this programme and the previous ones. We have a parallel programme called ODF Sustainability — and we have not lost contact with States that have become ODF. There is continued engagement. There is also focus on ‘ODF plus’, which is about solid and liquid waste management and swachhata in general.

I was recently in Rajasthan and visited several villages where — yes, there is greater awareness, there is momentum. But not everyone has toilets and there are toilets which are incomplete. A few are being used for storage or they don’t have a water connection. Even with a working toilet, half the family goes out to the fields. And this is a State that was declared ODF a year ago. What would you say about this kind of ground reality that disputes your figures?

Let me just take you through the process of declaration [of a State as] ODF. It’s quite rigorous. First, there is self declaration by the village in an open aam sabha. Then there is verification by an agency from the district level or block level. Then, the State government sometimes does sample verification and so do we. So, the process is fairly robust, and then we have got this national rural annual survey.

If there are specific cases in Rajasthan, they need to be addressed. Whenever we get a case where someone reports to us that somewhere there is a problem on the ground, or a toilet is not constructed, or someone is still going out to the open — they may be isolated cases — we refer it to the State.

These are not really isolated cases. Is it possible that to meet the Prime Minister’s deadline, you are moving too fast to make ODF declarations? Maybe we need to accept that behavioural change takes longer than infrastructure construction?

All the feedback we get from our colleagues on the ground says that one of the reasons this programme is so successful is because of the energy, the enthusiasm of the campaign. The fact that it [has been done] in campaign mode is what brings everyone together. The earlier approach was: ‘drip, drip, drip’. You don’t get anywhere with a ‘drip, drip’ method. You have got to build up momentum.

If you talk to the collectors, all the people who were the pioneers for their districts, whether it is in Bengal or whether it’s in Rajasthan, all of them said, “If you don’t do this in campaign mode, if you don’t get everyone in the district together, all segments, elected representatives, women, swachhagrahi s, sarpanchs, it is very difficult to do it over an extended period of time. You cannot sustain the enthusiasm.”

So in a year’s time, you are hoping to have worked yourself out of a job?

We have reached 93% coverage and eventually, we are going to get to 100%, and I think well before the October 2019 deadline set by the Prime Minister.

I think it is really important now to focus upon sustaining the ODF status. In some ways, this is even more challenging than achieving it in campaign mode, because this is something that has to be done on a continuous basis. People have got to understand that sustaining the gains is going to take time, it has got to get ingrained.

Let us focus on the infrastructure again. Above the ground is the toilet. Underneath lies the twin pit, which is a concept you have been promoting. Many people in rural India still prefer a septic tank or build faulty twin pits with liquid flowing into both. What do you think can be done to improve the awareness about the twin-pit toilets?

This is something we have been focussing on and we have got to focus even more. We are convinced that this twin-pit model, which can be used in most parts of rural India, [can] actually create a treatment plant in itself. The big problem with septic tanks is the disposal of the sludge. Sludge management is not a problem when you talk of the twin pit. Now of course, that needs to be propagated better, so we are now trying to market it as a colour TV, not as a black and white TV. We have got some of our Swachh Bharat ambassadors like Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar doing promotion. Masons are being trained. We have got a big collaboration with the Ministry of Skill Development.

These twin pits are designed to last for how many years?

Typically, for a family of four or five, five to six years.

Assuming that someone built a twin-pit toilet in the very first year of Swachh Bharat, the first emptying has to happen in 2020. What do you think is going to happen then?

This is part of the training and the awareness campaign, that when one of your pits fills up, in five to six years, this is what you need to do. You need to divert it to the second pit. When the first pit is closed for more than a year, then you can take out the compost. It is harmless, pathogen-free, and it is a great organic fertiliser.

There is better communication about twin pits now. But many of the toilets built in the early stages of the campaign did not use twin pits. What happens in five years when you open them up, find that you have not built them properly and have a pit full of sludge?

Part of the training we are [providing] is about retrofitting. Wherever there are deficiencies in construction, in some cases where there are single pits, you can retrofit them to second pits.

There is also the traditional ‘solid waste management strategy’ in this country, which is that particular castes are expected to clean excreta. Have you succeeded in eradicating that in the ODF States?

In a rural context, just to put it in perspective, the focus has been on conversion of insanitary toilets — dry latrines — to sanitary ones. And work has been going on on for the last three years and the reports we have received from the States are that this conversion is complete... We are also continuously monitoring this... but reports indicate that that has been taken care of in rural India.

So you are saying that if a State has been declared ODF, it means that this conversion has taken place?

Yes.

Even where Swachh Bharat has brought in sanitary toilets, if they have septic tanks or improperly built twin pits, they need to be cleaned. And it is often the former manual scavengers who are now being expected to do that. Of course, now they get paid for it. Do you think that is a move up, or…

I don’t know about specific cases. I have to tell you that one of the big outcomes of the Swachh Bharat Mission is that communities have come together. We think that the programme has actually broken these caste barriers.

The other question many people ask me is: who cleans these toilets? Households clean their toilets. These are simple toilets, it’s a rural pan, you don’t need much water and they maintain it themselves.

So we think that in many ways, this programme has not only empowered women and girls, it has actually brought communities together.

So would you see October 2, 2019 as the end of a journey or a milestone?

There’s no end to any journey in that sense. I would say it [would be] fulfilment in many ways. We would become an Open-Defecation Free India, and, of course, we would need to continue to sustain it.

Sanitation coverage has gone up from 39% when we started four years ago to over 93% today

Source: The Hindu, 3/10/2018