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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