India to monitor toilet use in cleanliness drive

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is launching a nationwide online programme to check whether people are using toilets as part of his cleanliness drive.  From next month, officials will head out with mobile phones, tablets and iPads to report on whether toilets are being used in rural India, with results uploaded onto a website in real time.  India's shortage of toilets costs the country more than $50 billion a year, mostly through premature deaths and hygiene-related diseases, according to a World Bank study. India suffers a greater cost than other Asian countries from the poor collection of human excreta, the study found.  About 626 million Indians defecate in the open compared with 14 million in China, the World Health Organization said in a 2012 report. 

Launching the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Campaign on 2 October, Modi promised to ‎build half a million toilets within 100 days.‎  The government says it has built 503,142 household latrines since then, pledging to make India "100% free" of open defecation by 2019.  "Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained," the government said in a statement on Wednesday. However, studies in the past have suggested that many people in rural India, despite having working toilets at home, continue to go out into the open believing it is more sanitary to defecate far from home. Hundreds of millions of people defecating outside leads to large numbers of hygiene-related diseases and premature deaths.  Reports say some of the new toilets are being used as storerooms by people who consider toilets at home unhygienic. Campaigners say that building toilets is not enough and that motivating people to use them is equally important.