NEW DELHI: A large-scale sanitation awareness and marketing drive is underway in interior Gujarat where budding experts of management are working with the state government to sell the concept of toilets to rural and tribal communities.In the last one year, more than 20 teams of students from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad have studied sanitation and toilet behaviour among people in at least 15 talukas in the state, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's hometown Vadnagar, and recently they submitted a set of suggestions to the state government to reach its ‘ Swachh Bharat ’ target and end the practice of open defecation.The state rural department has accepted most of these recommendations, officials said.ET reviewed a copy of the suggestions made by the students after their three-month field study in 20 villages mostly with a significant proportion of tribal communities.These include reaching out more to the ‘worst violators’ — mostly men over 50 who oppose toilets the most; looking at real life stories from countries like Cambodia and Bangladesh that have run successful campaigns against open defecation by getting community leaders to promote hygiene; and conducting ‘shameful walks’ in villages to show the villagers how defecating in the open causes diseases.Numbers released by the Centre recently show that Gujarat is one of the top performing states in building toilets. Nearly 4,66,918 household toilets were built in the state in 2015-16, up from 3,35,762 in the previous year, 1,55,268 in 2013-14, and 1,71,977 in 2012-13.Yet, it is not easy popularising toilets among tribals. The IIM-A teams, for example, observed that toilets are considered as an encroachment to ‘home space’ in some tribal villages.tudents have made some interesting suggestions to overcome such hindrances.Instead of ‘name and shame’, the expert groups have suggested a ‘name and fame’ campaign wherein people are incentivised to use toilets and honoured for doing so.The IIM Ahmedabad teams, along with the state government, have already piloted a 'star house' project in 10 villages where houses with toilets are marked with a star and honoured at the panchayat level.Students have also called for a friendlier campaign that won’t bombard people with the same information, but increase involvement of the panchayat machinery along with a directional participation of private players.For instance, they feel, replacing the current campaign narrative in villages such as ‘build a toilet and the government will pay you Rs 12,000’ and ‘it is shameful to defecate in open’, with campaigns such as ‘diarrhoea kills 188,000 children under five in India’ and ‘due to lack of cleanliness there is a loss of Rs 6,500 every year to each Indian (in medical cost)’ will make the programme more effective.They have suggested that the government is more flexible in allowing local customisations and beliefs in the construction of toilets, and have also given recommendations to push companies to build toilets in villages as part of their corporate social responsibility.They also suggested emulating the polio eradication campaign that the government had launched several years ago.Gujarat rural development commissioner Jayanti S Ravi said that one of the useful suggestions that the government is looking at is to train and get students of class V and VI to visit different households in a villages and come up with reports on the use of toilets by families. Families that no longer practice open defecation “are then declared super stars or model families by the village local bodies and felicitated at the taluka level”, she said.What the Gujarat government, based on the suggestions given by the students, is focusing on now is running information campaigns to change the perception of government toilets as being ‘dirty and dingy’, getting teachers and students together to maintain school toilets, forming women's groups to discuss on health issues, and appointing volunteers to conduct weekly ‘swachh gaon’ meetings.Social commentator Santosh Desai said the involvement of IIM-A will help understand cultural barriers that influence the working of programmes like Swachh Bharat. “But the effort needs to have humility as it shouldn't appear as ‘people who know everything are coming to guide people who don’t’,” he warned. “To me it appears to be a good diagnostic way of looking at socio-cultural issues by not just looking at the number of toilets built but also going beyond that,” Desai said.One key observation the students’ team visiting Gujarat villages was that the toilets they surveyed in tribal areas were often poorly maintained. In some cases they were made of mud and pebbles and in many of them lighting and space (especially for women) were more of a concern than water supply.For the maintenance of toilets the teams have suggested promoting a Gandhian model of self-sustenance by encouraging students and teachers to clean toilets, besides getting private players to conduct mass cleaning drives and introduce affordable and effective toilet cleaning equipment and phenyl in schools and hospitals.They have recommended repeated involvement of respected elders and priests as drivers of the campaign, paraphernalia for illiterate populace, folklore-themed dramas, and use of dish TV, kites and skits specifically aimed at the male patriarchal head of the family to promote the message of ‘swachh gaon’.IIM-A teams said the promotional campaign should also address practical issues that hinder the construction and use of toilets, including their ownership and erratic construction process.