Book Talks : Where India Goes - Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste

This post is quite special for me because it's different from the others that I had posted before. I am trying to go out my comfort zone. I am learning to write in English since someone told me to not waste my English skill. So, here I am, attempt to build a good article, not only pleasant to be read, but also write grammarly.

At this moment, I'll talk about the book that I just finished. The title is quite long, so I have to copy and paste : Where India Goes - Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste. From the title itself, you might could guess what this book talking about. There are toilet and caste. The things that cannot be parted from India.

The reason behind reading this book came from when I was surfing on my Twitter. There was a short video showed many Indian man doing open defecation in roadside, beach and field. It's opposite from the fact that India is one of developing country with skilled human resources, especially as we know from IT world.

Therefore, I tried to find the answer and my curiosity lead me to this book. This book talks about open defecation in rural lives, so basically I don't know the comparison between open defecation numbers between rural and urban lives in India. It didn't give me specific numbers. So, I just presume that this only talk open defecation in rural.

Before reading the book, I already prepared some hypothesis for my question : why open defecation frequently happened in India?

The answers are : poverty, limited education and less of the goverment's attention.

I was 100% confident with mine!

But, this book just told me the opposite.

Poverty is almost impossible. India is developing country and one of world's fastest growing economy. Although, poverty still widespread and 25% of the populations living on less $ 1.25, but compare from the other country that doing open defecation, e.g, Sub-Sahara country, Bangladesh and Nepal, the number of open defecation is still higher.

Nevertheless, the country that I've mentioned have the lower economic income than India.

How about education?

Education also not the reason. Indian people have better education system than the other country that doing open defection.

So, the last one is less of the government's attention also not the right answer. The government already provided latrines for every family in rural lives, instead of using the latrines, they used them as goods storage and place to laundry, then they go outside and doing daily activity every morning and afternoon : open defecation.

This becomes one of reason why I attracted to this book. This book could give me logic answers, not only from statement, but also from the actual data.

Besides, the logic answers, I also appreciate the way it talks about caste. Caste becomes one common thing in India. Probably some of you think that this system should be removed because it contrary from human right, especially for people who come from the lowest class, such Sudra or Dalit, but this kind of system already attached to Indian people. It becomes something natural that exist in every Indian people live.

I love how this book explain why caste playing the big role in open defecation. It's not only straightfoward, but also provides me some examples that kind of blow my mind. For particular people in higher class, they thought feces is dirty and unholy thing. And, the latrine itself is dirty place where the feces belong and it shouldn't be inside the house.

So, what if the house already has latrine?

In this case, the owner of the house didn't want to clean the feces. They will ask the lower class to clean it, the answer is a Dalit. In India, Dalit is identically with something dirty. This book calls Dalit as an "untouchability".

Open defecation also gives a big impact in society, especially in health issues. In this book mostly highlight about stunting and germs. Based on the data from WHO, stunting is a condition which children experience impaired growth from poor nutrition and repeated infection. Meanwhile, the spread of the germs often happens after open defecation, and mostly happened to children. So, some of babies in India pass away because got infected by germs.

After reading this book, I still haunted by curiosity, not from the reason behind open defecation, but the way of government takes to overcome this issue. I can say that to deal with issue means you have to deal with a system that rooted strongly in India's society. And, it's not an easy job because they have to change the perspective of people related open defecation, latrine management and every class in caste.