http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/11/30/stories/2008113050070300.htm

Villages in Kurukshetra district, Haryana, are showing
that providing clean sanitation to everyone is not an
impossible task.
In government schools around this country, adolescent
girls are dropping out, or missing school, because
there are no toilets.

Changed lives: Rekha in front of the toilet in her
compound.
Rekha is a landless labourer in the village of
Bishangarh in Haryana's Kurukshetra district. All
around her poorly constructed open brick house, where
the rain pours in through the rafters, are lush fields
of potato and wheat. She lives there w ith her
husband, an agricultural worker like her and her three
children, a girl and two boys. Between the two of
them, on the days they get work, they bring in around
Rs. 150 a day. Her husband gets paid twice as much as
her.

Rekha's pride is her outdoor toilet, built on the
corner of her small plot. She has no money to build a
door. A jute curtain does the job. But she has a
constant source of water. So the toilet remains clean
and there is no smell. The design is a simple one,
easy to maintain, with a soak pit that we are told
will not pollute the water table.

Talking point
The toilet revolution in Bishangarh and other villages
in Kurukshetra district has become a talking point. It
draws visitors from around India and the world who
look on in wonder as well-built Haryanvi women lustily
shout "Jai Swatchatha" (Long live cleanliness) and
show off the toilets attached to their homes. Each
costs around Rs. 1,200. The poor, like Rekha, get a
subsidy. The others pay what they can and the rest
comes from an NGO run by the local MP, young Navin
Jindal, whose beaming countenance greets you at every
street corner as you drive through the district.

Bishangarh has received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, the
prize instituted by the central government in
recognition of villages that are free of open
defecation. It is one of hundreds of villages across
the country that are qualifying for this award. The
women in the village, who are part of the Nigrani
(vigilance) Samitis, go around with torches, sticks
and whistles early in the morning. If they catch
anyone defecating in the open, they blow the whistle
and shine the torch on the crouching figure. This,
they believe, embarrasses the individual to the point
that they will not do it again.

There is no question that the toilet revolution has
made a huge difference to the lives of women, as well
as elderly men and children. No more do they have to
scramble in the dark in the nearby fields. Women,
especially, would have to go before dawn or wait until
after dusk. The absence of toilets assaults their
dignity, lays them open to sexual harassment and has a
direct impact on their health. Not anymore.

Is it sustainable?
But questions remain. Can this be sustained without
policing? Will people change their habits so easily,
particularly men who feel no embarrassment defecating
in the open? Can it work without a subsidy? Is it
possible in villages where there is no water? Where
there is no electricity? In Kurukshetra district, out
of 418 villages, 412 are electrified. And will it work
in villages with caste and communal divides, where the
villagers are not willing to cooperate? In Bishangarh,
the majority belongs not just to one caste, but even
one gotra (clan). The woman Sarpanch is also from the
same caste and gotra. Hence, getting everyone to work
together is a little easier. Women I spoke to
acknowledged that the situation would have been
different if they had been a "mixed" village, in
terms of caste.

One also hopes this will the first step in enhancing
women's status. For, women are visible in their
support of the toilet revolution. Yet in Haryana, and
Kurukshetra district, the sex ratio remains skewed in
favour of boys. And dowry has not disappeared although
some women insist it is declining. If one goes by what
Rekha's 18-year-old, college-going daughter Babita
has to say, it has increased. "People pay upto Rs.
10 lakhs", she says ruefully. And marriage, of
course, is inevitable, she adds. What other option is
there?

Babita is lucky that she has got as far as she has in
her education. In government schools around this
country, adolescent girls are dropping out, or missing
school, because there are no toilets. So when they get
their monthly period, they simply don't go to
school. In Kurukshetra district, all the schools have
toilets, claims the indefatigable Sumedha Kataria, the
Additional District Collector who is also the force
behind the sanitation movement in the district.

Bigger challenge
Of course, urban sanitation is an even bigger
challenge and intimately linked to the almost
insurmountable problem of providing housing for
millions of urban poor. You can build community
toilets but until you solve the housing crisis in
cities, you really will not be able to deal
effectively with sanitation. For women especially, the
absence of toilets is a far more traumatic experience
in cities than in villages as there are practically no
secluded places.

Some of the more innovative projects on show at the
recent Sacosan III (South Asian Conference on
Sanitation) in New Delhi — which incidentally was
virtually ignored by the "national" media in the
capital — were those where village self-help groups
are using simple technology to manufacture sanitary
napkins at low cost. This is being done in several
States and in at least one location in Tamil Nadu, the
increase in school attendance of adolescent girls has
been dramatic.

Toilets, sanitation, sanitary napkins, defecation —
these are not things we like to talk about. Yet, this
is such a fundamental issue that affects all our lives
— especially if we happen to be poor and women. Half
of India defecates in the open. The government hopes
to get all these 600 million people to start using
toilets by 2012. That's a lot of toilets to build in
just four years.

KALPANA SHARMA

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