CRAMMED into Meena Choudhary’s mud-brick house in Yeoor, on the outskirts of Mumbai, are a television, fridge and washing machine. Yet until recently her family of six relieved themselves in nearby fields. The morning ritual involved arming herself with a jug, stick and torch, negotiating squelching bogs and tall grass, glancing around for onlookers and thumping the ground a few times to scare off snakes. “It was stressful,” says Mrs Choudhary, who managed to persuade her husband to build a toilet at home two years ago.
Stories like Mrs Choudhary’s are music to the ears of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. He has pledged to eliminate “open defecation” by 2019. His government says it will spend almost $29bn to that end, providing a subsidy of 12,000 rupees ($187) for every toilet built. It claims the “Clean India Mission” has already led to the construction of 46m latrines, with another 64m to come.
But the scheme is beset by inefficiencies and graft. In December an investigation by the Indian Express revealed that in Dhamtari, a village in the state of Chhattisgarh declared to be “open defecation free”, a third of the households still had no toilet. “Millions of latrines reported built by the government are missing,” write Dean Spears and Diane Coffey in a new book on the subject.
Even when...Continue reading
from Asia http://ift.tt/2i7GT9B
EmoticonEmoticon