"Sanitation should be a habit, rather than a compulsion"
Sindhudurg district has been termed the cleanest in the country. In April this year, it became open defecation-free. The journey has been worth the destination. There is no one way of ensuring toilets to all and that people use them in the long term. Making the district open defecation-free was a tough call as every household has to subscribe to this objective.
I used religious faith as a tool to convince people of the importance of sanitation. We have 745 villages comprising more than 5,000 hamlets. Each hamlet has one traditional religious leader, locally called “Gaonkar”. We worked with them to reach out to the larger community. But to begin with, we had to convince the religious leaders of the health and spiritual aspects of sanitation. Once that was achieved, it was easy as these religious leaders spread the message of total sanitation among their constituencies.
At the same time, we adopted the name and shame strategy for households who did not have toilets. That helped us in forcing people to build toilets. An interesting aspect of the district is that almost every household has a member working in Mumbai, and almost all of the district population aspires to work in the city. Our point was without having a toilet at home how could they aspire to adjust to life in a city. We also shame those who are already earning well in Mumbai but never bothered to construct a toilet for their family in the village. It all happened in meetings of panchayats which everybody attends.
At the same time, we facilitated those who wanted to build a toilet but could not afford it. The district administration arranges loans of Rs 12,000 from District Cooperative Banks at minimal interest of Rs 110 per month. The people of the district have a very high civic sense and the district has been historically doing well on the cleanliness front. There is good synergy between the people and the local government that has made cleanliness a habit rather than a compulsion.