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“Take poo to the loo,” is the catchy refrain of a graphic animated music video in which oversized piles of anthropomorphized poo terrorize a town and dance to a techno beat before being successfully flushed away. The pulsing song, which incorporates sounds of farts and toilets flushing, was composed and sung by Shri Sriram, a British-Indian musician who has written music for high-profile projects like Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film Life of Pi.
The blunt public service announcement is tackling a social taboo head-on.
More than 620 million people in India don’t use toilets, according to UNICEF India. On a daily basis, people who defecate in the open leave 65 million kilograms of poo that isn’t disposed of by a sewage system.
“It’s a really major problem that is one of those things that people don’t want to talk about,” said David Morley, the president and CEO of UNICEF Canada.
“You’re either going to feel squeamish about it or not going to talk about it — or don’t even want to say the word poo,” he said.
All of that exposed human feces creates a major public health hazard. It contaminates drinking water in community wells, which causes diarrhea and worm infections in children. That in turn makes them more vulnerable to malnutrition, which plagues almost half of all children in India, according to UNICEF India.
The Poo2Loo campaign aims to change social norms toward outdoor defecation and encourage Indians to speak out against the lack of sanitation facilities in rural parts of the country. Since the effort started last November, more than 100,000 people have signed a pledge for a “poo-free nation.”
“The cheekiness of the campaign is catching people’s interest,” Morley said.
The problem is twofold. For the poorest 20 per cent of Indians, toilets simply aren’t available. Access is particularly scarce in rural India, where almost 70 per cent of the population has no access to toilets, according to UNICEF India.
Across the country, almost 28 million students do not have toilet facilities in their schools, which reduces school attendance and performance.
Adolescent girls are particularly likely to drop out because their school may not have adequate sanitation facilities. UNICEF India says the country is making progress: in 2012, 72 per cent of schools in India had separate toilets for girls, up from only 37 per cent in 2006.
But the issue goes beyond a lack of infrastructure. Because of cultural norms, people don’t always use latrines even when they are available, Morley said.
“We have to do behaviour change as well,” Morley said. “It seems obvious to us, but it’s sort of like (not) smoking or seatbelts seem obvious to us as well — there were behaviour campaigns that had to happen.”
The Poo2Loo campaign also includes an interactive online map for Indians to report spots where they’ve seen human excrement.
At the current rate of progress, India will not meet the sanitation target of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals until 2054, according to UNICEF India. Morley said campaigns like Poo2Loo aim to speed up that progress.
Watch the video of the “Poo Song” if you dare, full of gross animations, sound effects and colourful descriptions of poo:
Will a dancing pile of poo flush out India’s sanitation problem? | Toronto Star
Again, of course there are exceptions, but unfortunately this has become a trend now.
