India needs a huge toilet scam

If more people in India have access to a mobile telephone than to a toilet, as a United Nations study noted last year, the reason should be blindingly obvious. India’s telecom story can boast of a record-setting, headline- grabbing scam. India fails the toilet test miserably but where is the toilet scandal to rouse the public and set television ratings soaring?

No doubt, we came close. In the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, there was all manner of speculation about invoicing of toilet paper rolls at prices higher than many mobile phones.

The CWG organising committee general-secretary Lalit Bhanot also did his best to popularise toilets as a conversational topic across the country by astutely pointing out the intrinsic differences between the “western standard” of hygiene and our home-grown approach, as images of paan-stained washbasins and bathroom floors in the Games village went viral on the internet. But all this still does not have the buzz of the Rs1.76 lakh crore 2G spectrum scam, by now familiar to every man, woman, child and intelligent pet in India.

The toilet tale needs to be topical and trendy. Sanitation has to be sold as a style statement - as the cell phone.  Why else will anyone bother about dreary data such as these:  Inadequate sanitation cost India about 6.4% of its GDP or the equivalent of $53.8 billion (Rs2.4 trillion today) in 2006, a recent report supported by the World Bank noted. 

Though things have improved over the years, and we have our own toilet tsar Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Shauchalaya movement, yet almost 575 million people are still shitting or ‘defecating’ as experts like to call it, out in the open.

But what is to be done?   After listening to the new telecom minister Kapil Sibal, and prime minister Manmohan Singh, I think I know the answer. The ‘shit story’ needs a new peg. We desperately need a first-tier toilet scam in public interest. Let me explain.

Just as the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, scams come in two types - the ordinary, garden-variety scam and the public-interest scam, such as the one I suggest. In the first case, a few people make pots of money.  Others scream and shout. These ‘others’ include those who did not get a share of the loot, political opportunists, business rivals as well as genuinely concerned citizens and media busybodies. 

The public interest scam, on the other hand, is a totally different ball game. Here, the apparent loot is a means to promote public good. Think 2G. I am not a telecom expert, but I do what I can. I diligently follow everything that Sibal says. Our new telecom minister, a highly intelligent man and a Stephanian to boot, told us a while ago that there has been zero loss to the exchequer in the 2G spectrum scam.

It appears that those who are baying for the UPA government’s blood have completely missed the point about the 2G story. The telecom policy was aimed at promoting teledensity instead of revenue. So the revenue loss which has been hogging headlines past weeks is not really a loss at all.  Rather, it is a well-thought out strategy to promote a public good like increased teledensity - why, even my 21-year-old cellphone-savvy domestic help from Jharkhand knows this.

My faith in Sibal’s explanation was strengthened when prime minister Manmohan Singh reminded the nation’s leading names in television that if following such a telecom policy is viewed as a loss of revenue, the government’s subsidies for the poor could similarly be targeted as resulting in revenue loss. So, it all depends on what your assumptions are.

One thing is clear. The scam in public interest is an idea whose time has surely come. 

One Bindeshwar Pathak who is making some money, and in the legit way, out of constructing toilets in India and abroad is not enough. We have to get the glitterati, the Forbes-listed billionaires, the image consultants, corporate lobbyists, all interested in the toilet project.

Enough people have to think a killing can be made out of providing the Indian people better sanitation. The incentives to encourage such people can no doubt result in a revenue loss to the national exchequer. But think of it this way: if we finally get a toilet scam worth anything like Rs1.76 lakh crore, it would surely be a sign that India is dead serious about narrowing the gap between teledensity and toilet density.