People who attempt to urinate or defecate in public in Delhi’s wealthier neighbourhoods may soon find themselves loudly interrupted.

The city’s municipal council has announced that 28 turbaned, brightly coloured mascots will be deployed across the Lutyens Delhi area to watch for people relieving themselves around railway tracks or slum areas.

If the “Swachh Sewaks” (clean attendants) come across any offenders, they will blow a whistle and direct them to the nearest public toilet.

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has made it a priority to eradicate the practice of public defecation by October 2019. Unicef statistics show that more than half of rural Indians still defecate in public, excreting nearly 65,000 tonnes of faeces into the environment each day.

The practice, stubbornly ingrained in India’s rural culture in particular, is the main factor in the country’s high rate of diarrhoea-related deaths among children aged five and under. About 188,000 die each year from conditions linked to frequent bouts of diarrhoea, which weakens their immune systems and makes them more vulnerable to malnutrition and diseases such as polio or pneumonia.

Public defecation also contributes to crimes against women, who, for reasons of modesty, will usually venture out to relieve themselves early in the morning or late at night – making them more vulnerable to attackers. Police in Bihar said two years ago that about 400 rape cases in the state might have been prevented if the women had had toilets in their homes.

Poverty or lack of access to toilets are not the only factors: research has shown that many Indian villagers believe public defecating is healthier, and continue the practice even after a toilet is built in their area.

Modi announced in September that his “Swachh Bharat” (clean India) programme has built more than 25m toilets across the country. Delhi council has built 270 public toilets in the city as part of the drive.

Billboards were placed around the country in September that tried to shame upwardly mobile Indians into using toilets. A commercial featured a child pointing and laughing, telling an adult: “Uncle, you wear a tie around your neck, shoes on your feet, but you still defecate in the open. What kind of progress is this?”

A spokesman for New Delhi municipal council told an Indian news outlet that research had shown that the Swachh Sewaks might be even more persuasive. “We observed that people listen when being educated about an issue by another person,” he said. “There is a human connect that fines and billboard notifications cannot achieve.”