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There has been a sense among people who work in sanitation issues that the public campaign has focussed excessively on personal cleaning of trash in/around one’s house and insufficiently on the much bigger and more complicated issue of sanitation and open defecation. Going by the Google searches, it’s clear toilets are still getting little attention.
Sangita Vyas and Aashish Gupta, economists with the >Research Institute for Compassionate Economics , looked up at the Google searches for the last 90 days, which covers the run-up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s big announcement of the Swachh Bharat campaign, and the month after. They found that the generic “cleanliness” topped the five search terms they looked at, followed closely by “Swachh Bharat” and “Gandhiji”.
“Toilets”, “open defecation” and “sanitation” have not registered any notable increase.
The relative regional interest is a bit baffling – why is Kerala more interested in Gandhi? Why should Andhra Pradesh care more about Swachh Bharat? – but Karnataka appears to have more interest in toilets than others.
Will searching for toilets on Google translate into the people who need toilets – nearly 90 per cent of whom live in villages – getting them? Of course not. Is the welcome push on cleanliness by the new government creating new conversations on India’s enormous open defecation challenge? Not yet. Given that the proportion of the campaign’s budget being spent on awareness >has fallen , this might be something to worry about.
