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Some first-hand experiences, a warning, and bunch of spooky lore

On a fine wintry morning, the sun hasn’t risen yet and you’ve just boarded the first train from Howrah Station of Kolkata. The train gradually enters the rural settings and you look through the windows. Then suddenly, a something weird catches your attention.

You find an adult man in squatting posture near the bushes grown beside railway tracks.

You may wonder what he is doing at such an early hour.

While it may be hard to believe, it is a fact that a number of men like him come to the same spots, every day, to defecate. In order to avoid human witness, they leave their houses when it is still dark. You can easily identify them by the spouted water-pot they carry for washing and cleaning.

In my childhood, when I used to visit my ancestral village in Howrah, guardians and other seniors would often tell me to avoid shrubbery areas because I might, unknowingly, trample over human waste. Sometimes, I even got rebuked for venturing into areas mostly used for this specific purpose.

Studying Geology for five years gave me the opportunity to visit some of the remotest corners of India. I can still remember that during those field visits, our professors would always warn us about human waste that might be present beneath rock exposures.

Another interesting memory that I have surrounds the age-old spooky folklore and myths. A bamboo grove is not something that is frequented by villagers and thus, serves as a natural toilet for many. In these bamboo groves stays a specific type of ghost. It is called ‘besho bhoot’ in local language (‘baash’ is Bamboo in Bengali, which translates ‘besho bhoot’ to bamboo ghost). While travelling through any such grove at dawn, people usually avoids a leaning bamboo because it is thought to be a trap set by that mischievous ghost who pulls back the bamboo whenever someone attempts to cross it, thus hurting the person seriously. While there is a clear scientific reasoning behind it, villagers are driven by their natural instinct of fear and these amazing tales are cherished by generations.

I heard from some of my uncles who claimed to have witnessed such an eerie act, especially in winter time. Nights are longer in winter and a dark, misty ambiance of the dawn provides the perfect setting for the so-called besho bhoot to strike its blow.

Two years back, I was in Santiniketan to shoot a documentary. Our car driver had told us how he once made a narrow escape from the clutches of the besho bhoot in his native village in Bihar, the neighbouring state of West Bengal. Three of them were going for defecation in the morning, and ended up stumbling upon a fallen bamboo. He even claimed to have heard a voice in the air, saying – “You were lucky today!”

One of my school friends once told me another fascinating story he heard from his grandma. In their ancestral village in Burdwan, the West Bengal district popular for its rice production, villagers would often see two identical looking men sitting side by side and defecating in the fields. One of them was believed to be a spirit.

While all these are acceptable only as myths, there is one true fact we cannot deny accepting – open defecation, regardless of how harmful it is to community health, has been a part of the daily culture of a large population for ages.

Some facts and statistics

What discussed above gives a picture of what happens in rural Bengal. Bengal here refers to the Indian state of West Bengal as well as the entire country of Bangladesh (two of them constituted the Bengal Province before the partition took place on 15 August 1947).

In both Bengals, a significant percentage of people live in rural areas (it is 72.03% in West Bengal, as per 2011 census and 61.1% in Bangladesh, as per a 2021 report), with a decent number of households not having the proper sanitation facility.

As a result, according to experts and professionals, “…it is often difficult to walk along the rural paths without stepping on human excreta, especially in the rainy seasons when hanging latrines overflow and mess up the village paths and roads.”

Unfortunately, over 40% people in both these regions have no access to basic toilet facilities (42% in West Bengal, and 48% in Bangladesh), and these include rural and urban residents.

There was a time when defecating anywhere inside the house was considered dirty. Still today, if you enter any household in an Indian village, you will find that even if the toilet is made inside the premises, it is not attached to the main household. The concept of ‘attached toilet’ is exclusively an urban concept. It was once conceived by urban, economically sustainable families with a ‘Western’ influence.

Painstakingly, because human excreta acts as a natural fertiliser in an agricultural land, landowners even used to call people in the morning to defecate on their crop fields.

After the arrival of British, more human settlements developed, resulting in a population pressure increase. This practice didn’t vanish overnight, and along with other sanitation issues already there, it emerged as a much bigger problem. If you read texts by some of our finest authors of that time, including Rabindranath Tagore, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, you can get a glimpse of how diseases like cholera simply devastated villages after villages.

Besides India and Bangladesh, open defecation has been an issue in other south Asian countries, too.

Let me narrate something I read about Philippines.

Just a few decades back, slum dwellers in this ‘text capital of the world’ used to throw excreta-filled plastic bags on train roofs. When the railways made the rooves slanting on both sides to encounter the problem, people came up with something else. They started tying two bags with a thread and throwing them in such a manner so that the bags would hang from the edges.

While the ending sounds satiric and symbolic, the whole incident clearly demonstrates a deep social crisis.

This crisis is prevalent in many third world countries and a number of international organisations and NGOs have been working hard to find a solution. Governments are also taking toilet-building measures. But, until a health-conscious community can be created on a large scale, achieving the milestone is still a long way to go.

And, that is where the community-led total sanitation (CLTS) approach proves to be unique in the truest sense.

Railway tracks are one of the common spots for open defecation.
Image Source: swasthindia.ndtv

My first encounter with CLTS

CLTS is a participatory approach introduced to eliminate the problem of open defecation by creating self-awareness among the community and thereby encouraging them for self-development. Though it has been in use for more than twenty years now, it was only in the month of September last year I came to know about this brilliant method.

I was assigned with the task of transcribing some interviews of a documentary on sanitation. The first video sent to me was an interview given by Dr. Kamal Kar, a senior development specialist in rural development. He has been working in the field of agriculture and livestock production.

In that video interview, he narrated the whole story beautifully. As a rural development professional, he had to travel to various rural regions of Bangladesh. These visits provided him with the opportunity to observe the consequences of open defecation, and he felt that something had to be done.

The end-product was the idea of CLTS.

How it all started?

The year was 1998. WaterAid requested Dr. Kar to lead a participatory impact assessment of their water and sanitation programme implemented by VERC (Village Education Resource Centre), a partner of WaterAid, ten years earlier. WaterAid is an international, non-governmental organisation headquartered in London, with their areas of focus being water, sanitation, and hygiene.

This assessment was carried out in early 1999 by a seven-member team comprising WaterAid specialists and VERC staff. They visited four districts in north and south Bangladesh for data.

The poverty level was found varied throughout the country. However, interestingly, this assessment did not find a single village where open defecation was not practised. Some households had constructed toilets, but families with a better income could only afford such constructions. NGOs built subsidised toilets in villages, but only a few were aware of their uses.

Result? More than 15% of under-five mortality rate in Bangladesh was due to diarrhoeal disease.

What happened next can be quoted from Kar’s writing: “For the first time we realised that ‘outsider motivated external subsidy-oriented toilet construction’ was a far cry from what might take the form of ‘total sanitation of the village by catalysed participation and self-mobilisation’.”

The new findings led the specialists’ team to change their approach and they shifted their focus from participatory poverty assessment to ‘no subsidy community empowerment approach’. A big team was now formed that included VERC field staff (health motivators and area programme coordinators) and social development professionals from WaterAid Bangladesh.

Next, they were given extensive training and field trials on empowering every member of a community in order to improve sanitation conditions in a specific village. Once the training episode was complete, the team was further divided into four teams to work in four different study areas. Each team had an experienced external facilitator to lead.

The teams used to take transect walks (known as ‘walks of shame’) with community members accompanying them. Although the villagers felt ashamed to show the places of defecation to the dignified outsiders at first, the experts succeeded in winning their trust. Every walk campaign ended in fixing the date and time for a meeting with the community members to discuss effective measures to eradicate the persistent problem.

But how exactly were those people motivated about this issue? Let it be explained in Dr. Kar’s own words:

“We used to use those techniques and do big mapping. Maps on the ground using colours and all that. The entire village used to stand around that – men, women, and children. More than 200-300 people. One day, we asked them – “You’ve already indicated your houses. Please indicate where you go to defecate. Use this sawdust and put it on the map.” Oh! Immediately, all those people ran onto the map, and they started throwing sawdust, a yellow powder and other stuff. Within no time, we saw the entire village [on the map] turned yellow. The sawdust covered everything and they also saw it. They were laughing, screaming – it was big fun. But when they saw that the whole map turned yellow, they became silent. Everybody stopped. Because they were shocked and surprised with the visual impact. [They thought –] “What the hell are we doing?” It was full of shit. The whole village was full of shit. The women started covering their noses with their sarees and stuff they had, and started spitting here and there. They started realising, for the first time, that they were allowing their children to grow on shit, and they had been ingesting each other’s faeces.”

In a nutshell, the initial sense of embarrassment experienced by the community came as an awakening to the harsh reality they were living through.

The initial push. A photo from Ghana. Image Source - Wikimedia Commons

And they took matters into their own hands…

As soon as there was an attitudinal change, the fruit was imminent.

Trained facilitators indeed played a great role in making the communities realise the importance of the subject. But the way people responded was truly inspiring.

While transcribing the interview, I was listening to Dr. Kar with great awe. A couple of women stood up first and declared that this age-old practice must be stopped. “We cannot just do this”, they said. Then added – “We cannot live like animals. We are human beings. And as human beings, we cannot ingest each other’s feces. How are we going to stop it?” That is how a ‘sudden ignition’, as Kar named it occurred.

Young children started digging pits, while some older people made a bold promise – “Without constructing a toilet, I will not take my next meal.”

Their approach was very methodical and scientific.

In the first step, they used their own calculative methods to get a brief idea of the amount of human excreta being deposited in the villages every year. Residents of Mosmoil village of Rajshahi and Barakumira village of Chittagong found the yearly amounts to be 50000 tons and 120000 tons, respectively. This way, they could understand the extent of the issue.

Visual tools provided by WaterAid Bangladesh also helped women and young children analyse their situation and spread awareness.

The next stage consisted of some immediate action plans, including forming sanitation action groups, making a list of households with their sanitation status, building makeshift latrines before going for a permanent solution, creating individual family plans to counter open defecation, discussing the matter in social and religious gatherings, imposing penalties on those still going to defecate in the open, etc.

From the very beginning, they understood one simple thing – they needed support and participation from each individual of the community. A strong social solidarity helped them establish a sustainable economic structure.

For example, if somebody was found landless, a rich land owner would give that person a piece of land to construct their own latrine.

When necessity led to innovation

But what fascinated Dr. Kar and others more were the innovative designs those villagers had come up with. In his words: “Very interestingly, it was noticed that financial wellbeing influences the type of plans adopted for constructing toilets. Those who can afford it start obtaining information on the availability of hardware like rings, latrine slabs and pans from outside sources, while those who cannot afford to purchase the costlier hardware start planning homemade toilets, digging pits, using bamboo and wooden planks and other locally available materials. The freedom to innovate and experiment leads to the opportunity to choose, and people are able to pick toilet models based on their capacity.”

This idea, in turn, motivated a group of villagers who would later be termed as ‘barefoot engineers’. They had the natural talent to execute these designs and the best thing is that they could do it at a much lower cost. Technical support from the VERC and WaterAid-B engineers and their own knowledge about the local environment led to the formation of latrines that suited the local conditions well.

Let me explain it with an example. The southern part of the country is known for its high rainfall, a high water table, and tidal waves. So the community there built offset pit toilets where the pit was placed away from the squatting plate and a pipe was used to connect the pit to the plate. In this way, they could avoid splashing of water.

In a few years, about twenty such effective models had been developed by the communities, with the cheapest one costing as low as TK. 70 (equivalent to USD 1.27 then).

Women and children leading the pack

“Women and children first.”

Those who have watched the 1997 James Cameron-directed international blockbuster ‘Titanic’ know this famous (or infamous) line. Ship Captain Edward John Smith (portrayed by English actor Bernard Hill) was seen giving this order in a nervous state. As depicted in the movie, this protocol and its poor execution resulted in a more disastrous ending to the lives of the passengers.

But what if these two groups (usually considered second class in a male-dominated society) really come first when there raises a question of community participation?

The answer is simple. It only brings success.

That was what happened in the case of CLTS.

Women were the most sufferers of open defecation. Apart from health issues, there were other moral problems. Harassment was a common thing they faced, for which they used to go when it was dark. So, naturally, they turned out to be ‘the greatest internal forces for mobilisation and promotional activities in the villages.’

They also took part in raising awareness about other sanitation essentials, including regular washing of hands, using hand pumps for drinking water, covering food items, and discussing personal hygiene with the others. For this reason, WATSAN (a portmanteau of ‘Water’ and ‘Sanitation’) committees in most villages were largely made up of women.

And, while they were busy convincing their partners as well as the whole community, their sons and daughters did not step back.

Kamal Kar himself had narrated how enthusiastically those children would start digging pits and developing their own slogans to address the issue. Their attitude towards countering the problem made their parents embarrassed initially but eventually, motivated and proactive.

Other responsibilities the children took included organising village processions, collecting basic information, marking the open defecation sites, reporting incidents of open defecation to WATSAN Committee, and building paths to help VERC health motivators move easily.

Cultural aspects were another significant part of their campaign. These young children composed social plays and Gambhira songs and dance. Gambhira is a well-known folk song where two male performers personify a man and his maternal grandfather and discuss a topic to spread social awareness. It is common in Malda district of West Bengal and Chapai Nawabganj, Rajsahi and Nawgaon districts of Bangladesh.

Note that all these three Bangladesh districts share the international border with West Bengal. Even though Bengal was divided on religious lines on the eve of India’s independence, those barbed wire fences were not enough to annihilate the age-old practices and rituals of this region. Thus, Gambhira persisted, so as, though unfortunate, open defecation.

Whatsoever, these energetic young minds had come up with a unique solution where they were using one custom to eradicate the other.

A 'walk of shame' organised by villagers in Malawi. Image Source - Wikimedia Commons

What’s more?

I was going through the paper by Dr. Kar, ‘Subsidy or self-respect? Participatory total community sanitation in Bangladesh’ (published in 2003) when suddenly one particular picture caught my attention.

It is of a signboard attached to a tree, which says: Baidyapur graame khola jaygay keu paykhana korena. (‘No one in Baidyapur village defecates in the open’).

Baidyapur is a village in the Nachole Upazila of Chapai Nawabganj District. Other villages had also proudly declared themselves as ‘100% free of open defecation’ at that time. Word of mouth played a pivotal role here. Whenever someone from a 100% ODF (open defecation free) village used to visit another village to meet any relative or family member, they would pass the message.

This way, the news spread not only to adjacent villages but also far off ones.

Right from the beginning, they set deadlines to achieve the target. They competed against each other. Households with no toilets were allowed to share with others, but no one was allowed to go in the open. Landlords were pressurised to construct toilets for their tenants who had no choice but to continue defecating in the open. Last but not least, they even carried out night patrols and early morning raids on common defecation spots.

Considering the situation present a few years back, this was undoubtedly a remarkable achievement. Although the initial push was made by some trained outsiders, the community does deserve its due credit.

But that was not all.

Once a significant number of villages were declared open defecation-free, it was time to make the whole union (11-15 villages in Bangladesh constitute a union) free of open defecation. Because of such unprecedented success, local administrations also got involved in the campaign.

This way, what once was only a distant dream had turned into a reality.

The positive impact

Within 3-4 days of stopping the practice, villagers noticed that the filthy smell was gone. Flies also disappeared within 7-10 days of the beginning of the new reality.

I had earlier mentioned that in pre-CLTS time, over 15% of under-five mortality rate in Bangladesh was due to diarrhoeal diseases. This percentage dropped, thereby reducing medicine and treatment expenses of local people at a large scale.

Diarrhoeal diseases like cholera and dysentery were most common in haor regions of Bangladesh. While you may or may not know what haor refers to, let me explain it. ‘Haor’ is the local name for vast low-lying areas present in the northeastern Bangladesh. These areas remain waterlogged for more than half a year. Amid the vast lying depressions, there occur some raised land masses – densely populated. The villages founded on these land masses are known as ‘anthis’. Because of overpopulation, infections could spread fast.

The introduction of CLTS in these regions helped haor people experience ‘the meaning of a clean environment for the first time.’

Well, considering the methodology of the approach and the determined participation of the whole community, such improvements were, though remarkable, quite predicted, weren’t they? You will be amazed to know that CLTS succeeded to make a huge impact on their economic structure, too.

As the demand for toilets grew, a significant number of local entrepreneurs emerged. They started importing low cost plastic pans, coloured, from foreign countries like Myanmar and Thailand. In addition, they started supplying spare parts for constructing toilets. It, in turn, led to VERC staff to spend more time with community members discussing the issue.

The rural Bengal is river-fed and hosts highly fertile soil, which supports intense crop growth. Beside field crops, a large variety of fruits also grow here. If you visit any village in the districts of Malda or Murshidabad in West Bengal or the districts of Rajshahi or Chapai Nawabganj in the summer, you can easily get lost in vast mango groves, some of which receive very little light even in daytime.

Before CLTS was introduced, purchasers found it difficult to enter the groves because of the smell of the shit spread over everywhere. Naturally, harvesters could not also charge a high price. But as soon as open defecation stopped in these regions, harvesters could now proudly name their prices.

Toilet cleaners also made a good profit. Earlier, sweepers available for toilet cleaning were only a few and they charged high, unaffordable rates (about 200 Taka, which was around USD 3.64 at that time). They also had no option because they hardly got these assignments.

As consciousness grew, sweepers started getting more calls. Gradually, they transformed into community cleaners and could half their rates (100 Taka).

By the time Dr. Kar published his paper entitled ‘Subsidy or Self Respect...’, more than 400 villages in Bangladesh was free of open defecation. It was equivalent to 15000 communities.

Fifteen thousand!

Dr. Kamal Kar. Image Source - CLTS Foundation

Beyond Boundaries

Such was the success of CLTS that it took no time for it to spread to other countries.

Apart from WaterAid Bangladesh and VERC, other organisations also came forward. Top names included Danish Agency for Development Assistance (DANIDA), Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), and now-dissolved Department for International Development (DFID) of UK.

Shortly after implementing the strategy in various districts of Bangladesh, Dr. Kar was called in the New Delhi headquarter of Water and Sanitation Programme South Asia (WSP-SA). This programme is an initiative launched by World Bank.

This lecture took place in December 2001, and within two months, on Dr. Kar’s advice, WSP-SA New Delhi and Dhaka joined hands together to organise a regional workshop at Rural Development Academy, Bogra, Bangladesh. In that workshop, the number of participants was forty-five, which included district magistrates, NGOs, state secretaries, international bilateral funding agencies, and journalists from India and Bangladesh. They came in close contact with the communities who had just pulled off a miracle. This way, that workshop succeeded in spreading the idea in the two neighbouring countries.

In India, the first two states where this approach was first introduced were Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. While the state government itself took the responsibility in Maharashtra, it was an NGO that played its role in Tamil Nadu.

The districts of Ahmed Nagar and Nanded witnessed the maximum progress in this regard. One village, especially, is worth mentioning here. This village named Borban in Ahmed Nagar had declared themselves open defecation free in January 2003. Communities here used to refuse marriage proposals for their girls from villages that still practised open defecation.

Other countries where CLTS had been introduced to included Cambodia, Mongolia, and some African countries like Zambia and Uganda.

Later, after CLTS became an established approach in 2011, this list further extended. As of now, more than 70 countries have adopted this strategy.

It translates to communities of more than 70 countries having understood the dangers associated with open defecation and stepped forward.

Summing up…

As we are nearing the end, perhaps you have been thinking that CLTS is devoid of limitations.

Well, limitations are there, and the experiences I shared at the very start clearly indicate that open defecation is still practised in India, one of the first countries where CLTS was launched following its success in Bangladesh. In fact, in 2016, while giving an interview to ‘Down To Earth’, Dr. Kar had openly said, “One of the serious risks is that India might become the graveyard of CLTS.”

The effectiveness of the approach is second to none but whether it will bring effects depends on some exclusive factors, including the positive attitude within the government and non-government bodies, quality and skills of the facilitators, etc. When all the factors work together, only then success can be achieved.

India is a large country, not really in terms of area but in terms of population. Adding to that, improper policy making and ineffective execution of strategies have only worsened the situation. After BJP-led government had come to central power in 2014, a right-wing rule has been gradually imposed.

The same year they came to the power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’, claiming that they would completely eliminate open defecation in the next five years. And like a number of claims, in 2019, they declared that India had attained its ‘100% ODF’ status.

Interestingly, it clashed with the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, himself a strong proponent of sanitation and cleanliness.

That declaration was a simple publicity stunt. In July 2021, a JMP (joint monitoring programme) report published by WHO and UNICEF showed that still 15% of total Indian population was defecating in the open.

India is a large country, not in terms of area but in terms of population, of which a major part lives under poverty. Age-old traditions and rituals have been a part of people’s lives here. Making such a country ODF in just five years is not any walk in the park for sure. Experienced experts like Dr. Kar expressed their concern over the matter because such a validation would block any chance of further research and development.

But as living beings, we always hope. Because “hope is a good thing, maybe the best, and no good thing ever dies.”

So, we hope.

We hope one day every human individual stops defecating in the open.

We hope one day our promising politicians understand the basic concept of CLTS – “Shift the role from chasing toilets to constructing human beings who will transform the society.”

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