Let's face the odorous truth. India is not going to meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of turning 'open defecation free' (ODF) by 2015. Not by 2020 and not even years beyond.

And this is not "vested ramblings" from donor agencies like the World Bank, UNICEF or Water Aid, that have been critical of the rural development ministry administered subsidy-driven total sanitation campaign (TSC), a comprehensive programme to ensure sanitation facilities in rural areas with the broader goal of eradicating the practice of open defecation.

The ministry itself has been shifting its target year for achieving the ODF status; first set at 2010, then 2012, and again pushed to 2015.

In a candid interview to Governance Now in March last year, the minister of state for rural development, Agatha Sangma, who looks after the water and sanitation programme, had acknowledged that the ministry’s goal of making India ODF by 2015 was unrealistic.

So what has gone wrong?

The World Bank came out with a report in July 2010 questioning the sustainability of the ministry's Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP), a cash incentive to encourage villages go 'open defecation free'. The government doles out Rs 50,000 to Rs 50 lakh every year to villages that achieve the ODF status.

“Studies on NGP sustainability showed that only 73 percent have access to toilets in NGP villages, while usage of household toilets is low at 67 percent,” said the report.

What the report demonstrated was that while villages do achieve the ODF status, lured by the cash incentive, they fail to sustain it in the long run. The toilets states helps construct lie unused with people going back to the age-old practice of defecating in the open.

In another report commissioned by the RD ministry and prepared by World Bank's water and sanitation programme and released in May this year, TSC scored 58 (on a scale of 100) for the total process and 48 for sustain it.

So, is there any other approach to contain this practice?

If you believe the proponents of community-led sanitation programme (CLTS), what is required is community triggered behavioural change and not government doles.

“CLTS is an innovative methodology for mobilising communities to completely eliminate open defecation (OD). Communities are facilitated to conduct their own appraisal and analysis of open defecation (OD) and take their own action to become ODF (open defecation free),” says the home page of CLTS website. 

At the heart of CLTS lies the recognition that merely providing toilets does not guarantee their use nor results in improved sanitation and hygiene.

Kamal Kar, a developmental consultant who pioneered the concept says the earlier approaches (read subsidy-driven) to sanitation often led to uneven adoption, problems with long-term sustainability and only partial use, besides creating a culture of dependence on subsidies.

He was speaking at the India launch of 'Shit matters: the Potential of community-led Total Sanitation', a book by Lyla Mehta and Synne Movik in the capital on Wednesday.

Recounting his Bangladesh experience where the concept was tested first in 2000, he said, the analytical approach rather than the government doles or an attempt to shame the villagers who indulge in open defection works better.  “What is required to be driven home in communities is the health, hygiene, security, income—implications.”

“In Mosmoil, a village in the Rajshahi district of Bangladesh, we succeeded in persuading the local NGO to stop top-down toilet construction through subsidy. What we advocated was change in institutional attitude and the need to draw on intense local mobilisation and facilitation to enable villagers to analyse their sanitation and waste situation and bring about collective decision-making to stop open defecation.”

In three years the village achieved ODF status and soon the movement spread like a wild fire in many parts of Bangladesh, he recounted. The CLTS approach has been adopted in 43 countries of Asia , Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

“What can work in a poor country like Bangladesh and many other countries in Africa can very well work in India as well,” he said.

Let's hope the RD ministry is at least open to the idea of trying out something which works rather than carry on TSC that has clearly not worked as yet.