Toilet as an Asset: Necessity versus Luxury

Abstract

Sanitation hinders overall development process and poor sanitation practices deprive human access to healthy living conditions. Improving sanitation is crucial to gear the development process in India whose sanitation performance has been unsatisfactory even after a program for better sanitation in place since 1986. This paper focuses on sanitation condition in 78 villages of Mewat district of Haryana in comparison to Haryana and India as a whole. The findings show that Mewat’s sanitation condition has been dismal negatively affecting the other paradigms of development. Also, we studied on to the asset holding preferences of the rural inhabitants to understand the effectiveness of fiscal benefits under the current scheme- Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan. The findings report that rural households which own other kinds of luxury and mediocre assets still fail to have toilets in their homes. In such cases, non-affordability could not be a reason and instead households do not consider toilet as a necessity. Therefore, compensatory policy becomes inefficient and ineffective means to improve sanitation situation. Additionally, financial support has become a disincentive for people to install toilet facility and the real poor continues to be deprived of the compensation as he can’t afford the start up cost of building toilets which makes him eligible for the sum of rupees under the scheme. Strengthening IEC and promoting community led sanitation are ways ahead to improve sanitation condition in India.

Keywords: Sanitation, Toilets, Asset Ownership, NBA