How a Sixteen Year Old Girl Unknowingly Started a Sanitation Revolution in a Village in Andhra Pradesh
“So do you know what you want to do after your bachelor’s in computers?” Pat comes the reply — MBA finance — from the nineteen year old girl. Surrounded by translators and sanitation volunteers, I look up from my notes to see that they all have the same proud smiles on their faces. As they should.
Three years ago, Lakshmi Tirupattama stopped eating in protest when her mother refused to construct a toilet in their house. “I was not interested in constructing the toilet. All I knew was that it would generate a bad smell in the entire house, take up too much space, and affect vaastu. I finally relented when she stopped eating and consented to having a toilet in the house,” Lakshmi’s mother recounts with a wry smile. Two months later, her house was one of the first few houses to have a toilet in the village of Chandapuram in Nandigama district, Andhra Pradesh.
But the battle for constructing the very first toilet in her village was not done yet. Undeterred by aging parents and no sibling to help out, Lakshmi dug the pit for getting a toilet sanctioned against government subsidy. It took her a total of three weeks to dig the pit along with attending school and some help from her father.
“What motivated me so much to put in time and effort into constructing a toilet were the difficulties that came along with having to go outside and far for defecating or even during my periods. And with the rainy season coming up in a month, it would be even harder to go outside. I knew I didn’t want to go through all of those challenges again.”
Lakshmi’s family of three has her father as the sole breadwinner. He works as a daily wage labourer — earning up to Rs. 300 per day — on the days he is able to find work, and work is increasingly difficult to find. With an annual income of about Rs. 40,000, the family stands below the poverty line and are from the scheduled caste community. The Andhra Pradesh government under the Swachha Andhra Mission reimburses Rs. 15,000 to households for the construction of a toilet of 4x6 feet. However, constructing a toilet in this region can easily cost a household up to Rs. 20,000 to 25,000. With that kind of expenditure even after the subsidy, Lakshmi could hardly be expected to dare to dream of constructing a toilet.
The effort that went into digging the pit to get a toilet sanctioned, although a challenge, was critical in bringing down costs and making Lakshmi’s household eligible for a building a toilet fully reimbursed by the government and spending nothing out of her own pocket.
This was made possible by an impactful and strategic collaboration across the government, a non-profit, and civil society actors. Tata Trusts having identified sanitation and hygiene a major priority area in summer 2016 after a data-intensive governance microplanning exercise innovatively brought to the fore a “revolving fund” — that would finance the construction of toilets for households and be funded by reimbursement from the government. This in turn could help beneficiaries construct a toilet unfazed by the administrative hurdles in claiming reimbursement. In an effort to reduce the financial burden of constructing toilets for the residents in rural Andhra Pradesh, it also undertook a series of experiments to do with central procurement of raw materials and using alternative materials for reducing costs. The concept of ‘shramdaan’ or voluntary labour further in the construction of toilets served two critical purposes — reducing costs and involving the community to take up ownership of the toilet construction and usage.
The project team also made a conscious effort to keep designing and construction of the toilet as user centric as possible, adding important elements like a bulb, hangers, and attractive tiles usually not present in standard government-subsidized toilets to make the toilet not just a physical fixture in the household’s premises but a usable and used addition to the house.
All of these factors added to the success of the Trusts starting with constructing 7 toilets in Chandapuram and finishing a total of 92 toilets by the end of the next eight months.
However, as has been suggested by evidence from government reports and non-profits, building toilets is not enough to encourage or promote usage. This is where on-ground volunteers deployed by Tata Trusts and Vijayavahini Charitable Foundation took charge of the long and difficult journey of promoting toilet usage. Sandhya, the first volunteer in Chandapuram recalls initial challenges, “people were satisfied with the way things were — they enjoyed going outside to defecate. Nobody came forward to construct toilets. Lakshmi taking that first step was a huge encouragement for us.”
Over the next eight months, this promising collaboration between stakeholders resulted in the construction of 92 toilets in this village. The on-ground team of volunteers organized various rallies and door-to-door sessions to raise awareness about the health consequences relating to open defecation. They also put stickers on houses and even took pictures of people defecating in the open to hold up a mirror. The volunteers took advantage of the government’s campaign, ‘Atma Gaurav Diksha’ or Self Respect which promoted that no woman should have to go outside of the house and feel unsafe to defecate. Several film screenings on the importance of sanitation and how to use toilets were screened for the entire village; the volunteers even went door-to-door to educate people on how to use toilets. It helped that the volunteers were locals — and residents of the village — trained in communication for behavioral change. Slowly, as another resident Mary, of the village puts it, “we could see that change has come.
As for Lakshmi’s house, it’s been almost three years since they built the toilet. Her mother has no complaints anymore — she keenly shares that instances of fever and malaria in her own household have decreased ever since the construction of the toilet. Even Lakshmi’s father, reluctant to use the toilet in the beginning like most male village elders, now staunchly refuses to go outside, she shares with a laugh. Lakshmi, quiet and unaware of the trailblazing influence she proved to be, is studying computers on a full scholarship from the government at a local college. To fund her MBA in finance, she’s determined to seek work — even if as a daily wage labourer — and pay for her studies. Her parents are understandably a little sad, but very supportive about the prospect of their only child securing a job in a big city after completing her education.
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Story by Snigdha Shahi
With inputs from VCF Team
