MHST
Part 1 in a Series: Women and Sanitation in India
NEW DELHI, INDIA – Anita Bai Narre, 23, of Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, is an unusual hero. The petite tribal woman made national headlines in 2011 when she refused to live with her husband after they married because there was no toilet in his house.
Narre says that the thought of relieving herself in the open terrified her. It also turned the newly married woman into a kind of rebel India had never seen before.
The young woman says that she marched back to her parents’ house barely three days after her marriage, boldly asking her husband to come and fetch her only after he had a toilet. This was enough to enlighten her husband and pass the message to the entire village that toilets are a must for women.
Soon, a group of villagers in support of Narre approached the village council, known locally as a panchayat, which, in turn, provided them with the required funds to build toilets. Thanks to Narre’s rebellious act, there will soon be a toilet for each family in her village.
Narre, who has since returned to her husband’s home, is now a brand ambassador for the government’s nationwide cleanliness drive. She has met a galaxy of celebrities and prominent people, including Pratibha Patil, the former president of India, who praised her courage.
Sulabh International Social Service Organization, an Indian charity organization working to improve sanitation, honored Narre earlier this year with 500,000 rupees ($9,000) for increasing awareness about sanitation and hygiene across the country.
“I am happy,” Narre told reporters and governmental officials gathered at the award ceremony.
Away from the glare of the media, hundreds of women like Narre in India today are contributing to this sanitation revolution. Advocates point out that sanitation is a safety, health and social justice issue. Successful villages credit their holistic strategies to achieve total sanitation: toilets, clean drinking water and drainage systems. Others recommend linking sanitation to women’s rights.
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister of drinking water and sanitation and of rural development, recently presented to Parliament that 60 percent of the total population in India doesn’t have access to a toilet. When it comes to women, the percentage increases to more than 70.
Only 25,000 of India’s 600,000 villages are officially “clean,” according to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. This means achieving total sanitation, which has three components: no open defecation, safe drinking water for every household and a drainage system to prevent stagnant water.
Like Narre, women across India have united to achieve total sanitation.
Achamma Guravaiah and Shantamma Narsaiah, two women in their early 50s, say they were tired of men expecting them to defecate in the open. So five years ago, these women demanded a toilet for each family in their village of Konaigudem in southern India.
“Nobody in our village is really too poor to build a toilet, yet they were not willing to invest in building one,” Guravaiah says. “They thought open defecation was no big deal and found spending thousands of rupees on building a toilet was an extravaganza.”
As their arguments continued to fall on deaf ears, it angered the women into action, even if it meant irking their men.
“They took it for granted that we, the women, also didn’t mind relieving ourselves in the open,” Guravaiah says.
The village council head was also serious about sanitation and had even adopted the Total Sanitation Campaign, a campaign launched in 1999 by the Ministry of Rural Development to end open defecation and provide basic sanitation for all. The federal government, with aid from the state government, helps families below the poverty line to build a toilet by paying 50 percent of the cost.
Now, along with the village head, the women adopted a cunning “name and shame” strategy.
“We started to make a list of people who squatted in the open,” Narsaiah says.
Guravaiah adds: “In the panchayat meetings, those names were read out.”
The strategy worked.
Humiliated by being publicly identified for defecating in the open, the men agreed to build private toilets. In 2007, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation selected the village for the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, the clean village award that grants 500,000 rupees ($9,000) to villages and districts for their sanitation advancements.
Like Konaigudem, Shahpur Jot of northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state is another village where women have played a proactive role in successfully implementing the government’s Total Sanitation Campaign.
The women from 148 households formed eight self-help groups to save money and also to take loans from a local bank to construct sanitary private latrines. The women also lobbied local legislator Dr. Waqar Ahmad Shah, who then disbursed 1 million rupees ($18,000) to the village council to construct drainage and garbage pits and to renovate hand pumps.
“The women also raised the issue before other government officials for the construction of schools for girls and toilets in primary schools,” says Jitendra Chaturvedi of the Developmental Association for Human Advancement, a nongovernmental organization that supported the women’s sanitation drive. “For them, it was a matter of privacy and security.”
Jagannadha Rao Adiraju, chairman of Human Action for Rural Development, a development organization that promotes alternative livelihoods in rural India, says that sanitation is also a safety issue. Hundreds of women in rural India endure sexual abuse every year while going outside to relieve themselves.
Adiraju cites the example of a 22-year-old sex worker from Srikakulam, a coastal town in south India, who was gang raped at the age of 14.
“There were no toilets, and the students had to go behind the bush to relieve themselves,” he says. “One afternoon, a group of men caught hold of her and raped her.”
He says the event ended her education.
“The girl dropped out of the school, partly fearing more such assaults,” he says. “But social stigma and lack of livelihood opportunities ultimately drove her to take up sex work to earn a living.”
He adds that more than 80 percent of girls who drop out of schools in rural India are teenagers who fear for their safety in schools without toilets, according to studies by his organization.
Kalavati Devi, head of Sindurimeta village in central India, is also leading a crusade against open defecation. For her, it’s a health issue.
“Here, villages are actually clusters of huts of buildings raised in a huge, common premise,” Devi says. “There is no compound or boundary dividing them. So, when someone urinates outside or in a corner of the house, it flows all the way to the neighbors’ yard. This not only creates a stink, but also allows germs to build.”
When a disease breaks out, the whole village falls sick, she says. Most villages don’t have health centers, and hospitals are far away, making treatment difficult and costly.
So Devi says that she has prioritized 100-percent sanitation over other development schemes, such as roads and education, because she considers it a basic right.
Women here say toilets are also essential to social justice.
Jassi Behn, 28, of Nana Shahpur village in the western state of Gujarat, comes from a family of Dalits, or the “untouchable” caste in the social hierarchy.
“The beneficiaries of every government scheme are usually those from the higher caste,” Behn says. “So when the Total Sanitation [Campaign] came to the village, the upper-caste neighbors got toilets and water.”
Meanwhile, the Dalits like Behn were left out during the campaign implementation from 2009 to 2010. Angered, Behn formed an all-women, all-Dalit pressure group in 2010.
“Nobody thought of us,” she says. “So we formed this group and started appealing to the district administration to release fresh fund[s] for those households that were yet to get the benefits.”
The group has received full support from their community’s men.
“These women have more strength and courage than you can imagine,” says Manji Bhai, a Dalit man from the village. “When they take to the street or lead a protest rally, their voices boom in the air. Nobody can ignore them.”
The men appreciate how women are fighting for all Dalits.
“We are supporting it wholeheartedly,” he says. “To deny someone the basic facilities like toilet or water just because he is a Dalit is the greatest injustice.”
The government responded to the group’s demands. Today, Behn and all her Dalit neighbors have toilets and clean drinking water.
And the sanitation demand isn’t confined to rural India. In urban areas, especially in the slums, women also suffer from the lack of sanitation.
“Most urban slums have community toilets that are shared by several families,” says Aprajita Ramsagar Singh, project director at Mahila SEWA Housing Trust.
Self-Employed Women’s Association established the trust to improve housing and infrastructure for poor women in the informal sector.
“For women living there, using these toilets is often a nightmare,” Singh says, “especially during the period of menstruation, as she needs more water, more time and more privacy – all of which are difficult to get.”
Singh also says that community toilets are often dysfunctional because of the many users and lack of maintenance.
“When there is no toilet and no water,” she says, “these women not only suffer the humiliation and hardship alone, but also fear for their growing children, especially their daughters.”
So Mahila SEWA Housing Trust provides loans of 12,000 rupees ($215) per family in Katihar, a small town in Bihar state, to construct their own toilets.
“We give the loans to the women members, who are ideally middle-aged and have children to take care of,” Singh says.
The organization has provided more than 50 families with toilets. Singh predicts the number to increase based on the women’s visible interest.
“A toilet is much more than just a sanitation unit,” she says. “They see this as it as a prized possession that reflects their care for the loved ones, as well as the ability to make a decision.”
Singh, however, says that the Total Sanitation Campaign can be successful only when people have access to water as well. She says that millions of people across India with toilets still defecate openly because they don’t have enough water to flush them.
Sukhantibai Partiti, who heads the Handitola village council in central India’s Chhattisgarh state, agrees. The 53-year-old has been trying to implement the Total Sanitation Campaign for six years. But the village has yet to achieve full sanitation because of a lack of regular water supply.
“I have received the fund required for building toilets for every house,” Partiti says. “But what is the point of building a toilet when the villagers don’t have the water to use it?”
Partiti is lobbying the Department of Water Resources and the Department of Health in Chhattisgarh to release funds to supply safe, clean water to the village.
“We must have a holistic approach to the issue of sanitation, instead of looking at one component at a time,” she says.
Hazipalli, a village near Hyderabad in southern India, has demonstrated a successful holistic sanitation strategy. In five years, the village council built toilets for individual families, laid drinking water pipelines, constructed an overhead water storage tank and an underground drainage system and installed multiple garbage containers.
The villagers also volunteered to desilt a community pond choked with debris and trash, creating a space to collect rainwater. The village has won multiple awards, including the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, now serving as a model for total sanitation.
“At the ministry level, it may look like a huge task to involve multiple departments and different sets of administrative decisions,” says Jangamma, the village council head, who doesn’t use her family name. “But when it comes to the local level of governance, we must blend them all into one scheme, something like a cascade.”
But despite the current push, it will be a long time before every woman in India enjoys total access to sanitation.
Involving more women in the campaign, though, will bring quicker and better results, agree Jangamma, Partiti and Ramesh, who has been vigorously pushing the total sanitation agenda since assuming office in 2011.
Ramesh lamented that Indian women were more vocal about getting mobile phones than toilets during his speech in June 2012 in New Delhi at the launch event of the Asia-Pacific Millennium Development Goals study by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Chaturvedi says that in order to involve more women in the sanitation campaign, they must link sanitation to women’s rights issues, such as health, safety and privacy.
“The stronger is the link, the greater is the chance to motivate more women to directly speak against open defecation and seek proper sanitation,” he says.
Devi agrees.
“Once a woman sees a personal reason to have a toilet, she wants it more than anything else,” Devi says with a smile.
