I have been travelling in the little Rann of Kutchch this weekend. Wild asses. Flamingos. A beautiful hotel. No winter chills. And some curious discoveries.

Walking through a village my eye was caught by a mud house with an Indian style latrine in ceramic embedded into the mud floor outside. No walls. No roof. No water connections. No drainage or sewage. It seemed to be the storing place for newspapers and cardboard boxes. I looked enquiringly at my guide – to me it looked like a piece of installation art from Vivan Sunderama’s exhibition on garbage. My guide laughed. “Another scheme that the government has completed on paper as part of their sanitation goals. These latrines were supposed to be on a sharing basis with the householder having to pay for the walls and roofs. The government contractors have come and installed this like this, outside the house, and there it has sat. No-one wanted to build the walls. No one has actually come and told the villagers why a proper toilet is more hygienic. There was no motivation raised to change age old habits of going out in the open. So there are dozens like these all over the place. The contractor has shown that it has been built and has been paid. The official has ticked it off on his register. And nothing has changed”.

I thought of other more successful experiments with toilets. One was something I was involved with. Darpana had taken on a village not far from Gandhinagar for overall development. During the monsoon we found that several of the old and the infirm stopped eating – on enquiring why, we were told that they were afraid of going out in the open during the monsoon as the way was slushy, and eating less or nothing reduced the frequency of needing to go to the toilet! Horrified we asked the Rotary Club Metro for help and they readily gave us money for 12 toilets. Who would get them first? We held a series of gram sabhas to push the villagers themselves into deciding who were the most needy. The original choices were the obvious ones – the panchayat head and the richest and most powerful in the village. We suggested that they were not necessarily the neediest, that the blind widow who lived alone might be considered. After much discussion a fairly just list of recipients was worked out by the villagers and the much used toile and bath blocks are still much in evidence.

Another instance comes from a Tsunami hit village in Tamil Nadu. My friend Shyama Ramani, a professor living in France, felt that her students needed to have first hand experience in working in emergencies and arrived in Tamil Nadu soon after the rehabilitation work had just swung into action. Going from village to village they tried to assess the most urgent needs and came upon a village so devastated that the people seemed not to have even the energy or hunger to be rehabilitated. After many hours of conversations they hit upon the idea of engaging everyone in building toilets – people would get work, the village would get sanitation which it never had. So toilets were built using the masons and workers of the village. But once built, the people seemed loathe to use them. When Ramani’s team returned a year later they found that some of the toilets were in great demand, some looked ramshackled, others filthy. That’s when they hit upon the idea of having a yearly beauty contest for loos. A prize was announced. A flurry of cleaning activity followed and every year since then, with much keen competition and anticipation the best loo is garlanded, decorated with balloons and prize money handed over to the community using it. And in the process, all the loos are used constantly.

How many well intentioned government and NGO schemes remain only on paper when a little more thought could have made them helpful in the lives of the citizens who need help the most?