“Women demand mobile phones…not toilets. That is the mindset we have,” Jairam Ramesh on Friday told a conference in the Indian capital debating the Asia-Pacific Millennium Development Goals.

 

India’s national agency, Press Trust of India, characterized the remark as a lament. It must be so because Ramesh is not the telecom minister (though he might be a good candidate to sort out the mess in Indian telecom) but the rural development minister, and a very motivated one at that.

 

Many of us who are Indian, and have mostly lived in India, recognize this “mindset” or “culture,” if you will. Good sanitation has inexplicably escaped our age-old civilization. We think nothing of defecating in the open. In fact, many of us insist on that freedom. That is why we barely on par with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of the proportion of our population that has access to good sanitation. But unlike the poor African countries, the primary reason, historically, might be an unwillingness to build hygienic toilets or use them. 

 

For a rising nation with superpower aspirations, this might seem a trivial matter but the challenge is two-fold and real.

 

One, how do we build toilets for hundreds of millions of people inside a decade? Ramesh has set a target of 2022 for ending defecation in the open.

 

The first time we had the Toilets vs. Cellphones comparison was in 2010. It made global headlines after a smart World Bank analyst gently tossed up the stink bomb. It continues to embarrass Indians. Last year, when Anita Narre left her husband days after her wedding because his home didn’t have a proper toilet, the Pakistani press, among others, was quick to seize the news.

 

At that time, India had 700 million mobile phones, or one for more than half its 1.2 billion population. But only a third, or about 366 million, had access to proper toilets. That gap has grown because India adds nearly 10 million new mobile connections every month. Today, nearly 74% of the population, or about 884 million, own mobile phones. We do not keep statistics of new toilets but it might be reasonable to assume the growth is only a fraction when compared with cellphones.

 

Assuming 400 million Indians currently have access to proper toilets, it leaves the country the onerous task of building toilets for 800 million more over the next decade. Accepting the Third World benchmark of one toilet for 35 people, India will need to build 23 million new toilets — or 6,300 toilets every day.

 

If that is not daunting, the second might be: How do we change the “mindset,” as Ramesh termed it?

 

Here, the indefatigable minister has a plan. Ramesh wants to urge a film-maker like Shyam Benegal, rather than a Bollywood producer like Karan Johar, to produce a movie with the social message that defecating in the open is harmful to the nation — the World Bank in 2010 estimated an annual loss of $54 billion on account of resultant poor health — and its global aspirations. In the 1970s, the award-winning director transformed rural women’s attitudes to dairy farming with his film, “Manthan.”

 

One might be tempted to keep faith in the MIT-educated Ramesh. He is very able and determined. Still, to succeed, he needs to remain a minister for the next decade. Now, that’s a tall order in Indian politics.