I have been to India twice, and I can tell you from personal experience how difficult it is to go to the toilet in India.

A friend is about to leave for a trip to India. Before leaving, she has been worried. She consulted me in detail on WeChat about accommodation, transportation, meals, etc., and finally asked me a question: When are you traveling in India? , where do you go to the toilet?

When I talk about going to the toilet in India, I shed a lot of bitter tears.

As a tourist, you can find paid public toilets under special supervision near some long-distance bus stations or train stations and tourist attractions in big cities. You can enter conveniently by handing 10 to 20 rupees to the gatekeeper. . Inside the house are separate small rooms, all of which are squatting pits. For well-known reasons, Indian people do not use toilet paper but flush with water, so the floor of the toilet is generally filled with water. It was my first time to go to a public restroom and I was completely inexperienced. I almost slipped and slipped as soon as I strode in wearing flip-flops. After I carefully finished, I carefully filled the small plastic bucket next to me with water, poured it into the pit, and when I opened the door and walked out, I suddenly realized that the dirty water on the ground might have been splashed when people flushed the toilet. I thought of this I felt a little sick, so I quickly picked up my pants and jumped out on tiptoes. The Indian women next to me looked sideways at my weird behavior.

A few days later, I took a bus to a small town. After getting off the bus, I looked around for the toilet, and I saw a toilet exclusively for men - there were a few white tiles on the wall and some toilets on the floor. Several pits are laid one by one with cement to separate the space that symbolizes privacy, and it becomes an open-air toilet with Indian characteristics. It is convenient for the men to just turn around and leave calmly when they are done.

I couldn’t find the women’s restroom, so I rushed into a store for help. The store owner reluctantly allowed me to use the private restroom in his backyard. I immediately rushed in with a grateful heart and a bladder that was about to explode. I saw that the toilet was built with a few wooden bars and a tattered curtain. There was a big hole in the middle of the wooden bars, and an iron bucket was placed underneath. While squatting on it, my mind was filled with the plot of the movie "Slumdog Millionaire": the male protagonist Gemma Malik was taking a toilet in a simple toilet made of wooden planks, when a bomber suddenly circled overhead, and then the whole place was destroyed. The toilet exploded and excrement flew out from the hole... A few days later, I took the bus all the way south. The bumpy road and Bollywood music made me drowsy. Suddenly I felt a cramp in my stomach: It’s broken! It must have been from eating too much fried cauliflower wrapped in newspaper. I was always paying attention to the latest condition of my stomach and intestines, but later I felt I couldn't bear it anymore, so I quickly walked to the front and asked the driver to find a place with a public toilet to park. The driver who was driving and choosing vegetables told me that there are no public toilets here, but he would park in a safe place for my convenience.

After a while, the driver stopped the car. In full view of everyone, I took the toilet paper, jumped off the bus, trotted towards the wild fields on the roadside, and finally disappeared behind a patch of reeds. When I came back, everyone looked at me, a foreigner, kindly and smiled happily. At that moment, I was extremely glad that I would never see these people again in my life.

Night sleeper buses are also my favorite means of transportation when traveling in India. Of course, you don’t expect to be like traveling in Turkey, where the driver will stop at a service station with bright windows every time. During a nineteen-hour journey from Goa to Chennai, the driver would stop the car every four or five hours, and then beat the iron frame of the bed with the iron rod in his hand. Knocking and shouting: pee, pee, pee, timetopee... The voice was loud and the rhythm was rhyming. The passengers in the car got up sleepily and lined up to get off. The driver divided us into two groups, men and women. The men were in front of the car and the women were in the back. After finishing, the bus started again.

On the surface, it seems that the backward construction of public toilet facilities leads to inconvenience in going to the toilet. However, after I learned more about the toilet situation of local Indians, I found that the reasons behind it are even more complicated.

According to World Bank data, more than 70% of rural areas in India still lack public sanitation facilities. According to the 2017 WaterAid report, the number of people without basic sanitation facilities in India ranks first in the world with a huge "advantage" of 732 million (about 56% of the Indian population). In the slums of Mumbai, everyone uses public toilets. On average, every 81 people use one toilet. In some places, due to the surge in poverty, there is even a phenomenon that every 273 people use one toilet. , even the best place requires 58 people to use one toilet.

Data from the United Nations UNICEF shows that about 564 million people still defecate in the open in rural areas - solving problems in fields, forests, ponds, highways, and beaches. This behavior will spread diseases and lead to a series of environmental pollution, public health and other problems.

One of the most popular Indian movies last year was also about the toilet issue: "Toilet, a Love Story" (IMDB 7.5 points). The film tells the story of a pair of Indian young men and women who are struggling to fall in love. Entering into a sweet marriage, on the wedding night, the bride Jaye discovered that her husband’s house did not have a toilet.

Unable to bear relieving herself outdoors, she asked her husband Keshav that he must have a toilet, otherwise he would get divorced...

This odor-inducing and magical story is adapted from a true story: In 2012, Unable to bear the torture of defecating outdoors, Indian bride Anita Nally ran away from her husband's house on the fourth day after their wedding, claiming she would not go home without a separate toilet. After hearing the news, a charity built a toilet for her, and she returned home on the day the toilet was opened.

But in reality, not every woman is as lucky as she is, and charities come to help. During the process of defecating in the wild, many women are harassed and assaulted by members of the opposite sex. In the village of Katra, Uttar Pradesh, India, two girls aged 14 and 15 were raped to death by multiple people while defecating in the wild. Later, the girls' bodies were hung on a mango tree by the rapists; the police also Specific figures were given: 10 rape cases are reported every day, and 60% of the cases occur when women go out to use the toilet. A police officer in Bihar state said that more than 400 rape cases there occurred when women went to the toilet. If the victim had a separate toilet in his home, these tragedies would not have happened.

On the other side that tourists cannot see, absurdity is happening all the time.

So is it really that difficult to build a toilet in India? Yes, it is really that difficult, for three reasons:

First of all, Hinduism has a very paranoid concept of "cleanliness".

In India, you must take off your shoes when entering a temple and slippers when entering a house, because shoes are filled with filth and are considered unclean. A toilet containing human excrement is a hundred times dirtier than shoes. Hindus are not allowed to appear in such a place in their homes.

Although the Hindu caste system was explicitly abolished as early as the 1940s, it is not that easy to completely eradicate it from people's hearts. In the eyes of Hindus, cleaning excrement is the job of untouchables, and some high-caste people will never do it. Therefore, even if a toilet is built at home, who cleans and who cleans up is not a problem in our eyes, but it has become a problem in India. Big problem.

Australian writer Sarah Macdonald once mentioned in the book "Sacred Cow" that due to the caste system, she had to hire two servants, the untouchable servant to clean the toilet, and the upper-caste servant to clean the room and other tasks. area, and never step into the toilet.

India’s uncompromising attitude towards toilets makes it even more difficult to build toilets.

Secondly, going to the toilet in the wild is a good opportunity to relax and socialize.

In rural areas, people are actually very reluctant to go to the toilet, and men and women have different reasons for going to the toilet in the wild. Indian men like to go outdoors for convenience, mainly because they can save water at home; breathe fresh air at any time; take advantage of the opportunity to go to the toilet to hang out with their buddies, and avoid the nagging of their mothers.

After the tragedy of women being raped while using the toilet in the wild, some public institutions that play a big role in chastity called for if toilets were built at home, then women would not be raped. But in fact, going to the toilet in the wild is also a very important way of socializing for women: The reason is that the status of women in India has always been extremely low, especially in some remote and conservative rural areas. Women are not allowed to gather in the village to chat or discuss social issues and exchange opinions. Going to the toilet together in the wild gives them a moment of respite and relaxation.

Finally, Modi’s “Operation Toilet” faces many challenges.

As early as October 2014, in order to commemorate the 145th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, Indian Prime Minister Modi launched the “Clean India Initiative”. The core goal of this initiative is to build 12 million toilets in rural India, with a budget of Up to 20 billion US dollars to completely eliminate the bad habit of open defecation by 2019. Its slogan is: There is a toilet, go to the toilet, and rest assured.

But whether this goal can be achieved is still difficult to say. From the current point of view, not only is the progress of this vigorous "toilet building" movement seriously lagging behind, but many of them are just "face projects" - in order to show their political performance, local governments have blindly built many "fake toilets" that are not connected to sewage systems or septic tanks. "Public toilets, regardless of whether the toilets are actually usable. Such public toilets often lead to accumulation of excrement and are filthy, becoming a breeding ground for some infectious diseases such as malaria.

Another problem that needs to be faced is quality. Many toilets are used for only a short period of time and then fall into disrepair, all because of shoddy engineering or problems with design proportions. To address this issue, some government agencies offer construction training courses, but there is currently no standard course for health systems.

In addition, masons, who play an indispensable role in building toilets, are not willing to participate in course training. They prefer to learn through practical operations or apprenticeships, which also leads to a lack of quality in the toilets they build. together.

Even after the toilets were built, many villagers with stubborn ideas still refused to use them. There were customary reasons and religious factors. The lack of early publicity also put a question mark on whether the toilets can be used to their maximum potential.

In fact, not only outdoor defecation, but also many stubborn diseases and bad habits in Indian society will be difficult to eradicate in a short period of time. From a higher level, this also shows the dilemma of India in moving closer to modern civilization. India's thousands of years of tradition and culture are wealth, but they are also fetters.