$15m Donation for Constructing Toilets Along the Ganges

A Hindu spiritual leader has donated $15m to build thousands of toilets in villages along the Ganges in an effort to cleanse India’s holy river from the pollution caused by the country’s open defecation crisis

Mātā Amá¹›tānandamayÄ« DevÄ«, known as Amma (“mother”) to her followers, made the donation to prime minister Narendra Modi’s stuttering push to ensure all Indians are using toilets by 2019, saying it was “one of the most important tasks of the hour”.

In Hindu spirituality the Ganges is a source of purification, the holiest body of water on Earth. People living on its banks bathe in it and drink from it every day. This month during the Kumbh Mela, tens of millions of Hindus will cleanse themselves in its waters. But Amá¹›tānandamayÄ« told the Guardian these acts of necessity and devotion expose people to danger.

“The river is a symbol of the ancient Indian culture. But only some of what is called the Ganges today is the original pure water. The rest is sewage and factory waste,” she said. “People still have the faith that the Ganga is the Divine Mother herself and has healing properties. As such, millions go there to bathe and drink the water. Due to pollution, this can cause sickness.”

More than 600 million Indians have no access to a toilet. This exposes them to disease, indignity and danger. More than 200,000 children under the age of five die each year from diarrhoea and almost half of under fives have stunted growth (pdf) as a result of exposure to faecally transmitted infections.

On accepting her donation, India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley said: “Every poor person on the banks of the Ganga must have a toilet so that we can keep the environment clean and the pollutants of the households don’t get into the Ganga itself.”

Successive governments have failed to tackle open defecation in India, meaning the problem is now much worse than in neighbouring countries. A report by the World Health Organisation and Unicef (pdf) found that almost half of India’s population do not have access to proper toilets – compared to 1% in China, 3% in Bangladesh and 23% in Pakistan. Almost 60% of the world’s open defecation occurs in India.

Women and girls are particularly affected. To preserve their privacy many walk far into fields under cover of darkness to go to the toilet. Last year, two teenage girls in Uttar Pradesh were gang-raped and killed while on one such trip.

Modi’s response to the deaths in Uttar Pradesh and terrible statistics of disease was to launch an ambitious nationwide campaign to end the practice of open defecation in time for Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birthday in 2019.

“Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open?” he said in a speech to the nation in August 2014, driving the problem right up the political agenda.

This first year of the programme has seen a modest rise in the number of toilets being built. “It is difficult to get a reliable picture of progress,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, Unicef’s chief of water, sanitation and hygiene.

“However for India to achieve the government target of open defecation free status by 2019, states will need to accelerate coverage to reach 12% [of India’s 1.25 billion people] per year. The challenge is immense and acceleration is critical” he said.

But Tom Palakudiyil, WaterAid’s director of international programmes in Asia warned that Modi’s promise to build toilets for 60m homes had the potential to spark a “construction craze” that would not actually solve the crisis if the toilets remained unused.

In the past, India has built millions of rural toilets. But surveys have found that even in households with access to toilets, a quarter of men and 17% of women do not use them. Often newly constructed toilets are used as storage spaces or rubbish bins.

Palakudiyil said that the government had mandated that education and training be included in the Modi plan, however “in practice, when that goes from Delhi to the state capital, to the district level, it gets lost in translation purely because the functionary on the ground will know that his performance will be measured in the number of toilets and not in awareness-raising education camps that he organised in the village”.

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• Sanitation
• Portable Toilets & Waste Management