Why Indians are Too Stupid to Build Toilets – were it not for the Media!

There has been a ghastly rape in some Indian village. Two girls got raped and later hanged by the perpetrators after “they left their toilet-less home during the night to relieve themselves”.

Toilets are not the problem in India …

If you believe most of the media, then Indians, despite them being one of the first cultured people are too stupid to build toilets close to (or in) their homes.

Now Crisismaven actually was as old as these girls when in the heart of Europe, in rural areas as well as in the large cities, we still had no toilets but ramshackle wooden sheds in the backyard. You got your private parts frozen when you went out there in winter.

So, we even had stools with pots in them and then in the morning we’d empty them into that hole in the ground. That saved us from having to go out there in the dark and the cold (and no, at least grown men and women did not fear the dark out there – it was just easier to use the pot overnight).

In some areas city councils made it mandatory to get these holes emptied regularly. This was the job of a special “caste” of entrepreneurs that were not held in great esteem, but everyone needed them.

… nor are Indians too stupid to defecate closer to home!

Now are our Western media (and their urban, Western-educated Indian followers too) suggesting that the average Indian farmer or rural blacksmith (or whatever) is just too stupid to make the transition to the twenty-first century?

Or is there maybe a reason that is far more practical to this custom even if it means wandering far afield?

One of India’s methods of fertilisation: open-field defecation!

Indeed, there is: defecation in the open fields is a means of fertilisation!

In many areas this has been practiced for thousands of years and the success of their sustainable agriculture depends on the method.

Let’s take this back a bit to Indira Gandhi’s population control craze: Back then, in the late 1970s, the Indian government unleashed a campaign of “voluntary sterilisation” esp. for men. However, while they may have offered incentives to the men to let themselves be sterilised, they also offered a “per case” incentive to the doctors who traveled the countryside with mobile operating theatres under police or military protection.

Since the men began to hide when news of such a posse about to visit their village spread, these gangs adapted their method.

They lay in wait for the farmers when, at the break of dawn, they would wander into their fields for their “morning toilet”. Soon men would not go anymore.

Like with Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China (as an example of another socialist experiment) between 1958 and 1962, soon fields became less fertile. Harvests became smaller and in some areas it took years to reach the “pre-sterilisation” levels of crop yields.

Now, CrisisMaven wonders: will those who advocate toilets in these regions of India not only give them a toilet (a small one-off investment for any gung-ho charity) but will they then also pay for their fertiliser for years to come? Or will they simply learn not to apply Western standards to cultures that are anyway a lot older than theirs?