Whoever made the statement that the country hosts more temples than toilets, during the initial days following the call from the top brass in the government on October 2, 2014, for people to give up the time–honoured, read time-endured, open defecation in the land seems to have taken both the sublime (worshipping) and the mundane (defecation) lightly, to the chagrin of the devout and ridicule of the rest. The laudable, certainly overdue, appeal to the country’s diaspora for joining hands with the administration to achieve a clean India (Swacch Bharat) unwittingly got zeroed to the point of people in all walks of life openly debating the issue of open defecation finally settling in unanimity for creating toilets on a national scale as it were, not minding the cost.
The media reports that followed the clarion call to rid the country of the habit conspicuously featuring the rural people gave the impression that might reverse the aforementioned conjectural opinion connecting temple and toilet. However, the debate seems to have cooled off with no complete picture concerning toilets.
