BAREILLY: Used to the "comfortable fields", 90 families quietly demolished the toilets inside their house that was built under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) , preferring to go back to defecating in the open. Authorities, who sent notices to these "defaulters", reckon there may be many more in India's rural and semi-urban belts doing this, unable to break decades of habit. A bunch ofothers had removed the toilet seat and converted the space into a small store room.Building toilets in rural India was one of the major promises Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made during his Independence Day speech last year.The government has since moved fast on this and now claims to have constructed lakhs of toilets in India's countryside.But if the Bareillly experience, probably the first such incident of its kind that has come to light, is any indication, there is a tough job ahead for India's Swachh campaigners. According to a World Health Organisation and UNICEF report of 2014, already 82% of the 1 billion people practising open defecation in the world live in India. With 597 million, India holds the top slot, leaving the number 2 in this dubious list, Indonesia (54 million), far behind. Pakistan (41 million), Nigeria (39 million) and Ethiopia (34 million) take up the third, fourth and fifth places.The Bareilly revelation happened after a resident of Alampur Zafrabad block here complained to officials that several fellow villagers in whose house toilets were built by district authorities from government funds had brought them down on some pretext or the other.Alarmed at this, senior administration staff, including the district panchayat raj officer (DPRO) and district development officer (DDO), immediately ordered an inquiry. It was during the course of investigation that shocked officials realised house after house had done away with the toilets."When we sought to know why the families had done this, they came up with weird excuses," said an officer. "One of the residents said that as there wasn't enough living area in the house, they thought it fit to add extra space by removing the toilet. Others said the presence of a toilet in an already cramped house stopped their children from playing."One of the "defaulters", though, was candid enough to admit that elders and children were used to defecating in the open and found it "uncomfortable" to ease themselves in "unnatural surroundings". The toilets, constructed at a cost of Rs 12,000 each, were entirely funded by the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.TC Pandey, the DPRO here, was angry this had happened under his watch. “In the last financial year, more than 12,000 toilets were constructed in the district from government funds. And this is what these people do, even after they weren't asked to shell out a single rupee," he said. "We have issued notices to them and asked for an explanation within 15 days. If they don't have a proper answer, we will recover Rs 12,000 from each of them.”Pandey added, "Under the centralised local sanitation policy (CLPC), we try to educate villagers through documentaries and lectures on the harmful effects of defecating in the open. We even go to the extent of giving them graphic details on why it's bad and just how harmful it can be to humans. Still they refuse to understand."