Shruti Grover

Gu Bank

India is home to a hygiene paradox. Mukhopadhyay notes, public indifference to dirt and filth contrasts strikingly with the scrupulous attention paid to private cleanliness and bodily ‘purity’ as once waste is pushed out of the physical boundary of the house, it then belongs to the ‘public domain’ and therefore, everybody is entitled to dump rubbish or even defecate in it.

This indifference, coupled with cultural taboos related to the caste system has caused India to become the country with the lowest penetration of toilets in the whole world. 60 per cent of India defecates in the open. This rampant open defecation is causing serious bio-security issues, 6.5 per cent of India’s GDP is spent directly on health and productivity concerns.

'Gu Bank' is a project that attempts to create a tipping point for handling your own human waste via gamification of fecal matter. The context of the project is urban slums and the target audience are male migrants who remain the biggest defaulters to community sanitation solutions.

The enterprise offers male migrants an opportunity to trade in their waste for access to subsidised liquid petroleum gas used for cooking. At the heart of the enterprise is a culturally appropriate waste disposal bag which is anaerobically decomposted in Gu Bank’s Bio Methane plant. The removal of fecal matter from the public sphere hence ensures the community’s bio-security, removes CO2 and methane emissions and creates clean fuel which can power the city’s CNG-based transport system.