Blaming women for the state of sanitation in rural India, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has said that it is women who prefer mobile phones over toilets – a reference to the well-known piece of statistics that India has more mobile phones than toilets.

“Sanitation is a much more difficult issue. Women demand mobile phones but they are not demanding toilets,” he said at the launch of the UN report on millennium development goals (MDGs) on Friday.

Under the MDG pledged, the UN member nations including India have pledged to make open defecation a history.

“There is a certain norm with open defecation in Indian society,” he said adding that the government needed to change the behavioural pattern.

He criticized the role of women self-help groups that, according to him, concentrate only on income generation activities. “The priority of women self-help groups should be sanitation, not only income generation,” the minister pointed out.

Talking about the magnitude of the sanitation problem in India, he said, “India is a land of paradoxes. Sixty percent of open defecation in a country which has 700 million mobile phones ….the demand factor is more important. We build toilets but the toilets are not used and used as storage godowns,” said Ramesh. He called for a mass movement to address the issue.

He said that more toilet needed to be built in the rural areas. “We are dealing with the backlog of several years of neglect…There is severe underfunding in sanitation. Both funding and management in water supply and sanitation are very much on the mind of government,” the minister said. He promised changes in these sectors within a couple of months.

“There is just token sanitation care in the country,” said the minister. Ramesh also called for making India an open defecation free country in 10 years and announced a major restructuring of the total sanitation campaign (TSC).