Tuesday, November 18, 2014

A Toilet for Babli


During his independence day address, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged the members of Parliament and the corporate sector to ensure that there “should be a toilet in all the schools of our country. A separate toilet for girls...it is only then our girls will not have to quit schools”. Socially, anatomically and from security aspect, it is essential for girls to have separate toilets. With the high school drop out ratios at primary level even for males, and increasing unemployment rates of educated youth it is already a challenge to persuade parents to send their children for education. For the girl child, this becomes more difficult when there are no dedicated toilets for them in school leaving open defecation as the only alternative to embarrassment in shared toilets. Also, apart from open defecation within the school compound, girls would need to stay at home during menstruation as they have nowhere to manage their requirements, hence this would lead to secondary drop out rates near the crucial period of Board exams.
Under a proposal from Nitin Gadkari, rural households without sanitation will get Rs. 15,000 each for constructing toilets while schools will get Rs. 54,000 for same purpose. When passed, this will really empower women and schools. As per an article from Waterraid(http://www.wateraid.org/news/news/will-narendra-modi-free-india-from-open-defecation), the resulting unhealthy environments from open defecation  have terrible health impacts, particularly for children: over 200,000 die yearly due to diarrhoea and nearly half (48%) of under fives are stunted. It highlights also that there have been well intentioned campaigns in the past which have spectacularly failed  and that the number of open defecators in rural India increased by 40mn from Census 2001 to Census 2011.  Also, another study[1]  shows that rural coverage had reached 68% in 2011 – up from 22% in 2001 whereas census data showed that real coverage was only 31% thereby implying that only one in five latrines reportedly constructed since 2001 were in place in 2011.
What can we do to ensure that this time it works? First we will need to ensure that behaviours are changed via training, since students may be used to open defecation at home, and should be comfortable using closed latrines in schools. Also, there need to be budgets for the resultant spend on maintenance and upkeep(cleaning equipment, water supply, electricity).Also, toilet design should be eco-friendly and easy to maintain, without the dehumanizing practice of manual scavenging which is outlawed. Involving the local community in design and construction(via NREGA) would ensure that toilets are actually used by the target segment, instead of lying unused. We have the example of the post earthquake homes in Kutch which were not used as they did not meet the local needs of elevated kitchen platform etc. So one should not commit these mistakes. Looping in Sulabh International via PPP(with school fees footing the user charges), could be another good idea. HUL has announced the Domix Toilet Academy, an effort to build 2400 toilets by 2015, in partnership with local SHGs, and in areas of real need instead of just high visibility areas. Do help this noble cause by visiting http://www.domex.in/









[1] http://www.iwawaterwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/An+untold+story+of+policy+failure+the+Total+Sanitation+Campaign+in+India+

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