Toilets, health and human dignity – a World Toilet Day message from Sadhguru

Transcript: As it is important to have access to food and water, it is equally important for a human being to have access to a clean toilet to bring health, well-being and to establish human dignity. This becomes a very important dimension.

It is important that the world focuses on ensuring that the different dimensions of human life, particularly ingestion and excretion can be handled in a dignified way, in a healthy way, in a hygienic way. This is very important for the making of a civilised world.

The well-to-do in the world have taken these things for granted. In my experience, I have seen that 20-25 years ago – if I drive in the rural regions of India – in the evenings, the car headlights fell on people, and especially women,  would be sitting on the street side, because they feared going into the fields because of the reptiles, particularly the snakes. Because of that, they sit on the roadside thinking it will be dark and in case a car comes and it would light them up. They’re in a rush and what they would do with themselves always pained me so much. We worked to create hundreds of toilets, but today – fortunately – the federal government in India has taken it up to create hundreds of thousands of toilets, or literally millions of toilets across the country and this has changed the whole landscape in India, and it needs to happen across the whole world.

A simple aspect of our lives, a daily happening; if it has to be done in public, how ugly it becomes. And if it can be done in private how convenient, health and dignified it is for an individual human being.

So let us not take a simple aspect in our lives, which most people have taken for granted. Unfortunately for a large number of people, particularly women, it’s still not available in the country, there is a commitment from the civilised world to ensure that every human being has a dignified space to conduct the basic necessities of their lives like a toilet or excretion.

Let us all join together to make this World Toilet Day a great success.