Tania Rashid and Vice on HBO Highlight India’s Enduring Sanitation Crisis

The dignity to privately relieve oneself in a toilet and the ability to consume and cleanse with potable water are luxuries for 48 percent of Indians.

[Two boys fish in the highly polluted Yamuna River. | Photo Courtesy of HBO]

The dignity to privately relieve oneself in a toilet and the ability to consume and cleanse with portable water are luxuries for 48 percent of Indians. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that more than 600 million people in India, 53 percent of the country’s population, continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes, or in open water bodies without using a toilet or a latrine.

This custom is often more hazardous for women, who face the danger of sexual assault each time they must travel long distances to use a toilet or relieve themselves outdoors. Last year, two teenage girls from the state of Uttar Pradesh were gang-raped and found hung from a tree, simply because they left their village home to go to the toilet. This abomination serves to underscore that sanitation is an entitlement—a basic human right—that must be recognized and restored.

Journalist Tania Rashid recently teamed up with Vice on HBO to lend the power of the picture to India’s enduring water and sanitation crisis. The episode opens in Meerut—a city in Uttar Pradesh about 70 kilometers northeast of the national capital New Delhi—and continues on to Varanasi and Allahabad. The viewer is able to see just how absent sewage systems are in local neighborhoods and slums, as the camera focuses on a woman from the low Dalit caste whose job it is to scoop out the waste from alleyways behind homes and take it to a canal where it is released into the river.

These are the same rivers that are religiously revered for rites and rituals; the same rivers in which children and adults bathe and collect water for drinking. It is no wonder, then, that more than 800,000 children under the age of five die each year due to diarrheal diseases and pathogens present in feces that end up in their stomachs—from either not washing hands when using a latrine or toilet, or from contaminated food, water, soil, animals and flies.

Rashid recounts visiting the Jai Hind camp and interviewing a mother whose baby was, in essence, “rotting” just after birth. There were blisters all over the baby’s body due to inadequate nutrition and dehydration.

Another vivid scene in the episode (seen in the sneak peek below) is of a water tanker, which comes to the slum area every so often for families to fill their empty gallons and barrels with whatever little water they can acquire. The viewer sees the locals competitively scrambling and trampling one another to obtain as much water as possible, with hoses and spouts that had been picked up off the muddy ground, thereby cross-contaminating the water.

But Rashid’s interest in this project expanded far beyond the issue of open defecation and polluted water. India’s sanitation crisis crosses into concerns of gender, caste, socioeconomics, cultural psyche and policy.

“It’s a story that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, there’s so much more to it than just the toilet issue. When it got picked up [by Vice on HBO], I was really excited,” Rashid said. As a female journalist, she also experienced, first-hand, the feeling of holding her own waste in for hours on end, before finding a safe area to release. “I see how it can be liberating and everything, but you just see [feces] everywhere. It’s crazy!”

The Vice on HBO team was able to receive government permission and press visas, which made this project more accessible. Working off the record and undercover does not prove as effective, Rashid claimed. But with ex-Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi advocating for change, finally, all the necessary permissions and transparencies were in place.

Tharoor’s Swachh Bharat Mission and Modi’s “toilets before temples” campaign aim to end open defecation and ensure that every Indian household and school has its own toilet by 2019—the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. At India’s State of the Union, during his speech at the Red Fort, Modi said, “We need to build toilets before we build more temples.”

This became the slogan of Modi’s agenda towards sanitation as a key measure for the eventual eradication of extreme poverty, the development the Indian economy, and the invitation for foreign investment. As a result, many Indian companies have pledged tens of millions of dollars in support of more toilets.

From her research of the matter, Rashid acknowledges his efforts: “Modi is recognizing that [open defecation is] a big problem and is trying to manage it. He is showing his solidarity with the people by going out into the streets and cleaning himself.”

So, given governmental and financial backing, why do open defecation and resulting sanitation deficiencies still persist in the country?

“There are two states of mind,” Rashid said. “People see a problem and there are steps being taken, but there is such massive population growth in the country. The attitude of locals is pure apathy. This is how it is. People just prefer to defecate openly. For example, the Dalit woman, who is shown in the episode as a manual scavenger for waste, is not allowed to pray at the local temple because she is seen as dirty. Yet, she is allowed to go to the temple to scoop its nearby waste. [The issue runs] deeper; it’s about cultural mindset.”

Furthermore, former United States Representative Aaron Schock, who recently joined Modi in championing this cause, spoke to a few Indian villagers who shared that they find it unhygienic to share a toilet with others.“Why would I want to go into a room where my sister or mother or brother relieved themselves? That is unsanitary,” was a local sentiment. Even where there are public toilets in India, there is no mechanism in place for routine maintenance—thus Modi’s plan to have toilets recognized as private assets, which will hopefully incentivize families to keep them in better condition.

Rashid shared a snippet about Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of Sulabh International, a New Delhi-based sanitation charity that is active in toilet construction. Affectionately known as the “toilet guru,” 71-year-old Pathak has already constructed 1.3 million toilets for households using his cheap, two pit technology. When one pit is filled, it is covered, and the other pit is used. Within two years, the waste in the covered pit dries up, ridding itself of pathogens and becoming fertilizer that is ready for use. These two pit toilets use less than a gallon of water per flush, compared to 2.6 gallons of water for conventional latrines. Additionally, such toilets do not require attachments to underground sewer lines, which are nonexistent in most villages, and also eliminate the need to hire manual scavengers to scoop out waste. As an upper-class Brahmin, Pathak was made to consume cow dung and urine as part of a purification ritual at age 10 after he touched a woman who used to clean latrines. “This moment has stayed with me,” he said.

The necessary political, economic, and innovative powers are on board, yet India is far from realizing its sanitation goals. Ridding the country of open defecation and investing in cleaner water sources will take a cultural and social revolution. Building infrastructure will be impossible without widespread education. Journalists like Rashid and avenues like Vice on HBO are off to an admirable start, but ultimately, it will be up to India’s own to incite lasting change.

You can view the Vice on HBO episode trailer here and the full episode on HBO Go.