Patna, Bihar: The Central government has been on a public toilet building spree for some years now. But despite Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s efforts and prime Minister Modi’s appeals, people are still ‘going out’ in the open. So, now, the government is  trying to shame people into using toilets.

Between 2006 and 2012, authorities gave awards to about 6,000 villages for shifting completely to toilets. But many of them stopped using toilets because there was no incentive to sustain the new practice.

Newlyweds were asked to shun husbands who did not use toilets. In one campaign, rural men were reproached for making the veiled women in their families defecate in the open. But women’s organisations criticized the ads for ‘endorsing patriarchal attitudes’. As a result, in many villages toilets came to be regarded as important for women, not men.

An aggressive new campaign ridicules those who are no longer poor but continue to defecate in the open – a practice that remains common in rural India despite its ‘growing wealth and trappings of modern life’, says an article in the Washington Post.

Television commercials and billboards carry messages that strike at the heart of the Indian contradiction:  the world’s fastest-growing major economy where relieving oneself in the open is the norm!

In fact, the advertisements mock the very idea that India is developing. The tagline says: “Only the habit of using a toilet is real progress.” And the ridiculing is done by children.”Uncle, you wear a tie around your neck, shoes on your feet, but you still defecate in the open. What kind of progress is this?” asks a child in one commercial.

Another says: “You may have a smartphone in your hand, but you still squat on train tracks.”

Children are also shown making fun of men who buy a new flat-screen TV, refrigerator and a motorcycle but do not use a toilet.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Clean India” mission set a target of 2019 to end the practice, the government built millions of new toilets.

Research shows that one of the reasons for the stubborn social practice is the centuries-old caste system, in which cleaning human waste was a job reserved only for the lowest caste. Having a toilet at home is still considered unclean by many villagers. They regard it cleaner to go to the open fields.

The government is tweaking the definition of modernity. If you are truly modern, you use the toilet.

  Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, development, naked truth, Prime Minister Modi, sanitation, toilet