Bangladesh Rebrand: Using the Holy Language to Curb Public Urination

[su_heading size=”22″]The bustling city of Dhaka in Bangladesh has a problem with public urination –which often takes place right in front of signs reading, “Do not urinate.” The Ministry of Religion has launched a rebranding campaign aimed at curbing the problem. [/su_heading]

While the call of nature understandably must be answered, life is better for all of us if you hold it until you get to the proper place. In Dhaka, that’s often not the case. And signs forbidding it have proved useless in stemming the flow of public urinators.

“Dhaka is a city of mosques,” says a confounded religious elder in a promotional video released by the Ministry of Religion heralding a new plan to stop peeing in public.

“Every mosque provides a public toilet facility. Even then, I don’t understand why people urinate by the roadsides. Specifically where anti-urinal messages are written.”

Rebranding the message in the Holy Language

Even though there are public toilets in the mosques, critics  the city has nowhere near enough to accommodate its 15 million inhabitants. And the problem disproportionately affects the city’s large homeless population.

[quote align=’right’]Perhaps Dhaka divined inspiration for the idea from their neighbors in India who face the same problem. The Indian solution (which has thus far failed) has been to place pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses on the walls.”[/quote]

The problem, surmised the Ministry of Religion, is not the lack of toilets. No, that makes too much sense. The problem is that the “Do not urinate here” messages written in the native Bengali language don’t carry enough impact.

The solution? Write the message in the holy language of Arabic instead.

The idea being that by rebranding “Do not urinate” into the holy script, people would take greater heed –and find a better place to relieve themselves than on the sidewalk.

Perhaps Dhaka divined inspiration for the idea from their neighbors in India who face the same problem. The Indian solution (which has thus far failed) has been to place pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses on the walls presuming that, as the Atlantic put it, “Only God can stop public urination.”

Adnan R. Amin at Alal O Dulal Blog thinks that efforts by Bangladesh officials, while creative, are far askew of finding a greater solution.

The using of a religious misconception (“Arabic is a holy language”), to prevent a social evil, is clever. But it also reinforces and lends credence to that misconception, instead of dispelling it. One would think that for a ministry for religious affairs, dispelling religious misconceptions would outweigh protecting city-walls. If there were funds available to the government, Dhaka’s City Corporations could’ve used them to create better facilities for women. While it is difficult to discern from boardrooms, the 36 public toilets with facilities for women are now being used by men. Judging from the tactic and tone of  this video, a reexamining of both government bodies’ priorities seems to be in order.

As is often the case, rebranding is a stopgap, avoiding the more fundamental truth –the problem is not your message, the problem is your product. And in the case of the government of Bangladesh, a problem with the services you provide.

TITLE: Ministry of Religious Affairs: Language Matters