This has nothing to do with building toilets. Its with education. The northern parts of India has very low literacy rate. High literacy + HDI states like Kerala and Meghalaya was already clean. The dashboard of 2014 data proves that.
If people want toilets, they can spend some free time to dig a big pit in a nearby yard, and it will be more sanitary than their current situation. Ultimately the two go hand in hand (toilets and education) but education without toilets is a problem that solves itself, while toilets without education is doomed to fail.
Anyway, the original comment here, "this has nothing to do with toilets", still doesn't make sense. High literacy states aren't clean because of education, they are clean and educated because they aren't poor. And we all agree that education and toilets go hand in hand, the article addresses this. All I was responding to was the idea that toilets are irrelevant, which is ridiculous.
Yes, exactly! Do you know what "smart" (or rather, appropriately educated, which higher literacy helps) people can do? They can build things. They can design systems more complex than the default "shit -> river" and execute them. And have them working for years.
So yes, education is the problem. There are many DIY solutions people could use for themselves, on a small, local scale, if they had access to the information on how to do them. On a larger scale, say of a village, there are many infrastructural projects which could be done with just several people and a bit of knowledge. And everything above that is what governments specialize in.
Giving people toilets will solve nothing. Even if they will use them for a bit, they will shortly turn into smelly shitholes, worse than outdoors by far.
Instead, if they build the toilets themselves, there is a higher chance for them to maintain them. And they could be building their own toilets right now if not for illiteracy and lack of any education.
I know there are other problems: economical situation, ingrained traditions and so on. But education is the only way of battling these problems as well.