To encourage people to use toilets in rural areas, this IAS officer came up with a bold plan
Durga Nangre has never been this busy before. Along with a group of 19 women from her village, she has been toiling to meet an order worth Rs 1 lakh that her group has bagged from a wellknown corporate house. Residents of Moroshi village, located over 100 km from Pune, they have just been trained to convert night soil into manure and commercially exploit the product, according to a recent report by Pune Mirror.
The group of tribal women start their day early — once they have tended to their chores at home, they set out to extract night soil from toilet pits in neighbouring villages.
With at least 80 kg yield from a single pit, the group aims at collecting at least 500 kg every day. They need to work 10 days straight to meet the order for 5,000 kg of night soil that the corporate house, Mahindra & Mahindra wants for its gardens in Chakan, Pune.
“This is just the beginning. All this while, the material was simply going to waste and being dumped. Now, it’s going to pay for our households,” said Nangre, as other women around her busy themselves with sieving the night soil they have just brought from a pit. In the next two days, their first batch will be ready. The beginning What started off as an experiment to check if night soil could be used as manure in fields has now turned into a movement.
Over 300 women from 14 talukas in Pune have already enrolled to convert the waste into saleable manure. Buyers are lining up to pick up every kilo of the manure that has been found to be far more effective than chemical and organic ones.
It all started early this year when 29-year-old bureaucrat Ayush Prasad, who is posted as deputy collector in Khed, was looking for solutions to multiple issues — convincing villagers to use toilets constructed from government funds, emptying toilet pits that had filled up, and effective ways to dispose of night soil emptied from the pits. It occurred to him that if night soil from pits could be used as effective manure, it would resolve all the problems.
He began with getting night soil from several toilets tested by the Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research (DOGR), a premier research body in Rajgurunagar, funded by the central government. By May, scientists at DOGR came back with results. They had planted onions on their campus using all three — organic manure, chemical fertilisers and night soil. Night soil trumped the other two with nine per cent more yield than chemical fertiliser and 47 per cent more than organic manure.
Scientists at DOGR spent another five months running multiple tests on the yield and soil to check if the onions were edible. “By September, the results were out. Not only were the onions grown using night soil fit for consumption, but the soil itself was also richer. Moreover, results confirmed that higher yield from night soil was not an aberration. The material had a lot more nutrients than its counterparts,” said Prasad.
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