Lest we forget: World Toilet Day 2019 celebration concluded. Early morning follow up pictures on whatsapp feeds are rare now, any significant officers writing monosyllable- (sir...do that...do this...follow up) on the numerous groups stopped. and that also ended my plan to write something significant- a elusive academic paper on how new media- specially whatsapp messaging was a great tool utilized to further the campaign of Swachh Bharat across India.
Its good time to look back into the history of campaign in India's development history. When I joined college in 1999, it was perhaps the last few years of great literacy mission in India. I was selected to be a data collector for one of the Total Literacy Campaign districts in Haryana. However, I could not join then.
So, where are we now:
World Literacy Day 2019 celebrated not long before sometime in September. India and world had a great literacy programme in the decades of 80s & 90s. Literacy and Sanitation campaign has very very interesting similarity.
- Both were launched roughly same time---1988 and 1986*
- Governments have invested huge administrative energy in achieving literacy & sanitation.
- Both required huge motivation on the part of individuals and a favourable ecosystem to achieve the objective and continuing it. First generation in both cases are hard to handle.
- Both were looking for outcomes at district level- 1. Total Literate district and 2. ODF district
- Interesting programming progression- ODF to Post ODF and Literacy to Post Literacy.
- Similarly notified- resource agencies, and big media campaign relevant in their time and large partnership of schools, colleges, civil society organisations, volunteers etc.
So, what did we achieve through campaign.
- India's literacy is still at 74.04% with range of 63-93% from Bihar to Kerala.
- Female Literary perform below.
- No one talks about literacy any more. If anything we hear is perhaps annual three day talk when ASER report reveal learning outcome possible to compare that with "Usage" in case of sanitation.
- So, campaign resulted into benefiting states like- Kerala and other smaller states. Bigger states- MP, UP, Bihar and others are still below 70% #.
How government is looking at literary now. Perhaps we are waiting for the denominator to diminish to hit total literacy and that means a certain age group to be completely left for heavenly abode. Few are exceptions determined to be literate before starting the journey. Long live Bhageerathi Amma from Kerala who took literacy exam at the 105. @
Here another big assumption is anyone entering into age 7 is for sure going to be literate, which may not be reality considering our education system.
Open Defecation Free- Way Forward
India has declared itself open defecation free and have resolved to work on ODF sustainability. News Papers report and government's own programming efforts indicate there still are families who are either left out of baseline or using the shared facilities. Those need to be converted into families having their own household toilets.
As incentive regime staring to end sometime soon. We are making two big assumptions.
- Those families who are given incentive to build toilet have it and all members using it.
- All new housing unit being constructed in coming days will have toilets.
did it work for literacy? No, similar assumptions did not work with literacy and so it may not work for sanitation as well. Perhaps coming census 2021 will shed some light.
Till then, as someone who had decades of experience on sanitation said when the campaign launched in 2014 said..." all the good work in sanitation would now be done post 2nd October 2019"- Lets do good work and programme to sustain what we achieved during the campaign.
------a happy "engagementwithshit"
Disclaimer: Views expressed in blogs are personal and no way represents views of the organizations that I work with or worked with in the past.
