Priorities - About Shitting and Chatting

A frequently reported semi-embarassment for India this month was the joint WHO and UNICEF report titled "Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water".

To avoid misunderstandings, a definition from the report:

"An improved sanitation facility is one that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact"

OK. I feel that the term "improved sanitation" may be misunderstood - an improved sanitation facility could be expected to be one that showers and blow-dries your backside after use, but that is perhaps too much a Japanese view on things. No, for WHO and UNICEF, a sufficiently deep hole in the ground will do.

As far as the drinking water is concerned, let us just keep in mind that no mountain spring or melting ancient glacier is required for an "improved drinking water source", just some plain H2O without turds.

What was reported widely in Indian media - to an only mildly embarrassed readership - is the fact that India lets 665 million of its people shit in the open every day. Only 31% of India, roughly 366 million privileged people, have access to the fancy amenities the report defines as Improved Sanitation.

Interesting is the comparison: 545 million mobile phones currently operate in India, i.e. 45% of the population have a CDMA or GSM digital cellular phone, 3G currently being rolled out.

Is it only me or is there something wrong with the priorities?

Moreover, whereas the report states that "Open defecation is largely a rural phenomenon, most widely practiced in Southern Asian and Sub-Saharan Africa", I see and smell it in the very urban context of Bombay every day. And if the forest or scrubland of rural India may absorb a lot, urban pavements simply can't - despite the widely spread belief that undesired matter, whether faeces or garbage, disappears if you drop and then ignore it.

It would be unfair to say that nobody cares, there are meaningful initiatives like Sulabh International doing excellent work for the health and dignity of the people. Donate and support, even if the whole thing has a slightly unsettling messianic streak.

On the other hand, there seems to be an underlying issue in Indian culture which does not seem to worry too much about shit.

One example: A while ago at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, in preparation of an international lifestyle-related trade show, I noticed that there were no toilets available, so the workers emptied themselves into an open gutter right next to the exhibition hall and returned with little chance to clean themselves up.

I could not blame the poor guys for leaving disgusting finger prints on my show booth and the smell of the trench everywhere, so I complained with the owners of India's largest private sector exhibition facility, demanding that they open the toilets. They responded that they could not open the visitor toilets for "Labour". Sanitation for "Labour" is unheard of - a plainly bizarre idea. Labour is cheap, labour is low-caste, labour is filthy. No point in trying for hygiene and cleanliness.

It would, however, miss the point if we just blamed "the system". Take a tour of Dharavi and watch the kids shitting on open garbage piles right next to their homes. Pass through the slums along the main roads any early morning and watch the men literally take a crap on the roadside - paved or not. Be on the rooftop of the Rang Sharda hotel at Bandra reclamation in the evening and realise that the barely noticeable movement in the darkness below are women who try to use the cover of the night to save a little bit of their dignity, doing what the WHO would call defecating in the open in a urban environment. More than half of these people have a mobile phone, many of them have satellite TV. Is it really so difficult to organise and execute a hole in the ground?

At the end of the day I can't help noticing the irony: How many of the privileged men I see using proper toilets in hotels, airports and offices keep on chatting away on their phones inside their cubicles or whilst pissing - before leaving the Improved Sanitation Facility either without washing their hands at all or after performing a uniquely Indian ritual of rubbing thumb, index and middle finger of their right hand under running water for 2 seconds. But hand hygiene is a different matter, I suppose.

The Great Indian Motorist and the Ultra Low-Cost Car - An Open Letter

Dear Renault-Nissan, dear Bajaj, dear Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, GM, Hyundai and the rest of you,

I understand that more or less all of you intend to follow the lead of Tata's Nano and roll out Ultra Low-Cost Cars, small vehicles carrying a price tag of USD 2k ... 3k, within the next 2...3 years to flood India and other emerging markets. This is obviously a challenge and will be one of the most dynamic sectors in automotive engineering. Time to think out of the box, and reason enough to question the traditional Indian approach to take foreign designs based on, well, mature technology and then primarily rely on India's low labour cost, scale effects and a more cavalier approach to product quality in order to bring the price down.

So, Gentlemen, here comes some free advice and a deeper look at what functionalities can fairly simply be dropped on Indian roads:

1. Indicators: Whereas the rest of the world creates fancier and more elaborate designs, just skip this feature. No motorist in India uses indicators in any consistent or even predictable way, except, strangely enough, when switching on the hazard flashers in tunnels and fog. If your customers do not know what they are for and do not use them - why bother?

2. Rear view mirrors: As we now no longer require the mirrors to accommodate fancy indicators, there is no real reason to bolt these things to the vehicle. Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, folds them in anyway or does not replace them after they have been brushed off by pedestrians or other motorised vehicles. The internal mirror should be kept, so that your customer can occasionally check on his hairdo. And isn't there an underlying message? What you see in the rear view mirror is the past, and India shall not dwell on that - we look into the future, which, of course, lies ahead. Which brings us to point 3.

3. Headlights: Yes, the Great Indian Motorist will need them. After all, few places in the Universe are as dark as Indian roads at night, and few things have bigger holes in them. But why complicate matters by offering a choice of High Beam and Low Beam? The Great Indian Motorist only uses High Beam, of course, because he can see better and further. It is an interesting observation that some of the world's most sophisticated driving machines are imported to India with ultra-bright high-tech Xenon lighting systems, which then burn the retina of other people on the road to crisps as they are never ever switched into low beam. That oncoming traffic cannot see anything is someone else's problem, and India does not dwell on problems. There is one situation to dip the lights, though: To support the horn by flashing at and annoying the hell out of vehicles and other obstacles ahead. Nevertheless: To get the same obnoxious strobe effect, we can also briefly switch off the lights totally. Done.

4. Ventilation: Whereas the rest of the world demands air intakes, HEPA filters and high-performance climate control systems, you will be able to ignore all of that. The Great Indian Motorist does not believe in oxygen, and always sets the ventilation system to closed circulation. Fresh air is for other parts of the world (and rarely available in Indian cities anyway), your customers prefer the stale odour which can only develop in hermetically sealed environments under the influence of humidity, heat, underpaid slum-dwelling drivers spending long waiting hours in the vehicle and the worlds highest consumption and digestion of lentils. Aircon it is, on full throttle, refrigerating yesterday's gaseous content of the vehicle.

Now, you will say that you cannot do this, as these features are considered crucial elsewhere and important to protect your customers.

Face it: Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, is the world's worst driver, and he is more than happy to prove that by killing 150,000 fellow countrymen per year on the subcontinent's roads. Your job, however, is to manufacture and sell cars, not to run a driving school. The Great Indian Motorist does not give a rat's arse about his own safety, and much less about the safety of others. The Great Indian Motorist knows best what is good for him and what is silly stuff for the rest of the world - or as he would put in: People in Foreign. Indicators, mirrors, low beam, fresh air, common sense and regard for other people are not asked for in India.

So, Mr. Ratan Tata, Carlos Ghosn, Chung Mon-Koo, Takanobu Ito, Mr. Whitacre, Winterkorn, Bajaj and Toyoda, here is a straightforward way to shave unnecessary costs of your revolutionary cars and to help bringing out even more imbeciles to the roads of India. Take it, it is free.

You are welcome.