Last year I spent some months in India doing the field research for my PhD. It was a great and enlightening experience at all levels! Part of the research took place in Budni, a block in the state of Madhya Pradesh. There the national Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) was being implemented by a motivated officer, who had decided to use the CLTS approach progressively all over the block. At the point of time I was there (4 months after implementation started), the results were impressive: some Gram Panchayats (GP) had quickly achieved ODF status and in many more GPs people had started taking actions in order to change the sanitary situation of their GP.

One of the most interesting moments of my research was a workshop with the Master Trainers (MTs) – those who had triggered the GPs and were supporting them in the follow up phase. They were elected or administrative leaders from the GPs in the area that had shown their commitment and abilities during and after the CLTS Training of Trainers.

While talking about their experiences, the MTs explained the challenges they faced for triggering in several GPs where the villagers did not gather to hear what they had arrived for or even reacted against their intention to address the issue of shit!

The MTs felt that most of the tools they learned in the training were not adapted to them… but rather to their trainers or generally to people that would be considered outsiders in the GPs.

An outsider has a powerful identity (eg he comes from Delhi or Bhopal, belongs to an NGO, reaches the GP in a nice car), so he can talk to the villagers quite openly about ‘shit’ and even challenge or provoke them (eg asking “you want to keep on eating each others’ shit?”). Instead, MTs were reaching the GPs by motorbike or by bus and they might have distant relatives there. Their identity is thus less powerful for triggering, as they cannot escape local power dynamics; their caste, religion or political affiliation can be public and affect the predisposition of the villagers towards them. Thus, as one MT said, “you can be quickly thrown out of the villages if you start directly talking about shit!”

The MTs were not paralysed by that, but were innovating, trying new triggering tools and ‘learning by walking’. But possibly, it would be interesting to address this non-outsider identity issue already at the training stage.
Has anyone witnessed similar effects to those described above elsewhere? Do you have ideas on how to address this at the training stage?

Andrés Hueso, Group of Studies in Development, Cooperation and Ethics, Department of Projects Engineering, Technical University of Valencia