"India has been exotic. although the toilets I don’t enjoy," Sim says, recalling his sojourns in several places across the country, besides Orissa. The man who had successfully run a campaign to make toilets in Singapore cleaner and spread the mission to many other countries, is now busy tying up partnerships to work the same magic in India.
He will have his hands full. India and China, the rising economic powers, account for a fifth of the world’s 2.6 billion people who lack access to toilets. Public urination and defecation are part of the culture, even among the affluent. On the other hand, large slums and vast swathes of countrysides simply don’t have the infrastructure, leaving people to do the thing out in the open. Much of the incidence of water-borne diseases is traced to poor sanitation.
Sim says he is struck by the notions prevalent in India. While even the poorest of people want to dress up well, they leave the toilets filthy, stinking and unusable by the next guy. “They want to look good, but why not the toilets?” he wonders. Here, the campaign has to first sell the idea of toilets; make them glamorous, even a status symbol.
“I want to sell toilets like Gucci does its handbags and Rolex its watches,” he opens up. And that’s what he has done over the past decade as an international activist with a cistern-full of funny and innovative ideas.
At 40, Sim gave up his flourishing construction business and founded the World Toilet Organisation (WTO). “I figured out that more than money, time was important. So, I decided that for the rest of my years I will spend doing something that I like,” he says. That happened after Goh Chok Tong, who was the then prime minister of Singapore, observed that the state of public restrooms was one way to measure social graciousness.
The tiny city-state may now be a model of public hygiene, but those days, it had terrible toilets, he recounts. Although, Singapore had been running a clean public toilet campaign for over 20 years, the campaign had borne little result. So, inspired by the toilet associations in Japan, he decided to start his own movement to flush away Singapore’s foul toilet reputation.
He established the Restroom Association of Singapore (RAS) in 1998. He also realised that while there were other toilet associations doing good work in Singapore, there was no channel to facilitate information sharing and gathering of resources. “There was a lack of synergy and I took on the task of connecting everybody together under one umbrella organisation,” he explains.
That is how he founded the WTO in 2001. With only 15 members from Singapore, today, the organisation has members from 44 counties and has partnered with various financial institutions, including the ADB and UBS, for donating toilets.
Source http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/
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