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A toilet's the minimum qualification

Have loo, will contest. This is literally what aspirants to the gram panchayats of Karnataka have to say to the government before their nomination papers are accepted.

According to a new rule, every nomination paper must be accompanied by a certificate stating that the candidate has a toilet in his or her house.

And if you don't have one, the government has a special scheme through which it will help you build one. The sole purpose of the Nirmala Grama Yojana is to help villagers build heavily subsidised toilets at a cost of Rs 4,000 each.

Karnataka is again the first state to have a strange subsidy like this. An impressive number of 10,000 to 15,000 toilets are now being constructed per month under this scheme. Those who fall below the poverty line, with an income of less than Rs 11,000 per annum, get a subsidy of Rs 2,000 per toilet. The others get Rs 1,200.

A central government rural sanitation programme has been in existence for the past 13 years. However, only 100,000 toilets were built under it from 1985 to 1995. The central government pays only Rs 1,000 per toilet as it believes that rural sanitation should be the concern of the individual and not the government.

However, over 500,000 toilets have been built under the state government scheme over the past three years, since it was launched.

Karnataka has become the first Indian state to impose the toilet rider on panchayat members. The reason for this seemingly strange condition is, of course, that of hygiene.

Government officials point out that panchayat members must be role models for other villagers, and maintenance of high standards of rural sanitation is an important aspect of their role.

The state government had given the existing members a deadline of April 1998, by which time they were to prove that they had toilets in their houses or get disqualified. This threat seems to have worked quite well as recent surveys showed that only 10 per cent of the sitting members had not yet built their own toilets.

Now, with the next panchayat election scheduled for early in the New Year, the government anticipates a rush of toilet-building activity again. As the contest is on for more than 80,000 seats, and each seat might have at least three contenders, the government anticipates that more than 200,000 toilets will be built over the next few weeks.

The next round of toilet building will be in 2000 when there will be polls for zilla parishads and taluk panchayats. By the end of that, the villages of Karnataka should certainly be flush with toilets, if nothing else.

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