A PLACE TO GO 115But the pit still does have to be excavated—
and that has sharply limited the spread of twin-
pit latrines in India. “Villagers say, ‘No matter
how dry it is, it’s still poop,’ ” RICE’s Srivastav
says. “ ‘Removing it will make me untouchable.
People will not want to share a hookah with me.’ ”
For RICE’s Diane Cofey, that prejudice is the
nub of India’s problem. Teaching people that
ordinary pits take years to fill, not months, is im-
portant, she says; so are afordable pumps that
would make emptying pits more hygienic and less
disgusting. But the most important thing India
can do to stop open defecation, Cofey says, is “to
confront casteist ideas that make international-
ly normal latrine pits unacceptable.” Emptying a
latrine is never pleasant, she and Dean Spears
write in their book, Where India Goes. But in
other nations it’s at least not “a symbol of gener-
ations of oppression and humiliation.”
Parameswaran Iyer, India’s secretary of drink-
ing water and sanitation, acknowledges the role
that caste plays in sanitation. “But the Swachh
Bharat mission is actually helping to break down
barriers,” he insists, “because a village can’t
become open defecation free if diferent sections
aren’t ODF. The entire community is in it togeth-
er.” Iyer turns toward a hand-numbered sign on
his oice wall. “You see that?” he asks. “One
hundred thousand is the number of villages that
are ODF today.” Just 540,000 to go, I note, three
years before Modi’s deadline.
Iyer remains undaunted. The government re-
wards certified ODF villages by moving them to
the front of the line for road or drinking-water im-
provements, he says. It has launched an advertis-
ing campaign that exalts Swachh Bharat mascots,
like the 106-year-old woman in Chhattisgarh state
who sold seven goats to build two toilets. It has
enlisted cricket and Bollywood stars to exhort
people to use the new latrines. On the subject of
emptying them, the ads are silent.
Meanwhile villages keen on ODF status are
taking action against violators—Moolchand
chasing furtive lota-carriers is just one example.
In some villages, watch committees post photo-
graphs of violators on the Internet or shame them
on the radio. Village leaders may even jail ofend-
ers or fine them 500 rupees—more than twice
what a farmhand earns in a day—while district
leaders may cut of government rations of rice,
wheat, sugar, oil, or kerosene.
All these measures are beginning to have an
impact, Iyer says. “Even if there are centuries of
old habits and beliefs, I think they are changing
a little. The momentum has picked up.”
That may be true, but critics say the govern-
ment’s analysis of the remaining challenge is
too rosy. Citing UN statistics, it says that the
open-defecation rate declined from 75 to 44 per-
cent of the population between 1990 and 2015.
But that estimate reflects only the number of
latrines that have been constructed—not the