E-Kantipur

CHITWAN, DEC 24 -

A few months ago, when I visited the Saraswati Secondary School in the Jagatpur VDC in Chitwan district, the students were being taught about the importance of sanitation. Every morning, they provide reports on their own sanitation activities—whether they had been using proper toilet facilities or whether they had washed their hands with soap after going to the toilet. Similar rules have been established at all schools in the VDC.

Ishwari Timilsina, Vice Principal at the Siddharth Higher Secondary School at Parbatipur, says regular inspections have changed students’ behaviour. “Earlier, they wouldn’t wash hands after defecating, sometimes they wouldn’t use water at all. They would use stones and pieces of wood to clean themselves,” Timilsina says.

The campaign to correct behaviour amid schoolchildren was launched immediately after Jagatpur was declared an Open Defecation-free Area on April 17, 2010. The ten-point code of conduct developed by the VDC, political parties, school management committee, local civil society, social workers and different organisations requires that schools keep tabs on the toilet habits of their pupils. 

Sashita Sapkota, tenth grader at Sree Saraswati Secondary School, says, “The atmosphere has improved. Before, there was always a foul smell in the classrooms that made us sick.” Possibly as a consequence of the declaration, classroom attendance has also improved in the last year.

Further changes wrought by the campaign can be seen at the resettlement colony in Ward No. 9, where every house has a proper toilet. “We didn’t know it could be like this,” says Manrupa Pariyar, a resident. “In the past, the children used to fall sick frequently and we didn’t know why.”

 Hari Babu Dhakal, secretary of the VDC, says that in a situation where communities with low levels of awareness cannot be reached through mere rhetoric, it is essential to address their specific needs. “We invested in water pipelines and other requirements of the village first, and linked cleanliness to those projects,” he says.

Nowhere is it the success of the campaign more apparent than at the Ecological Sanitation (EcoSan) village—the Red Cross Gram—where people are not just using proper toilet facilities, but also making use of the human excreta produced. The 40 toilets in the village have been designed specifically to collect the urine and excreta through different outlets, and use them as manure in farming. Ram Bahadur Gurung, who lives in the Red Cross Gram, says that these toilets have been very beneficial. “We get almost five baskets of manure every two to three months, which help us produce high-yield, pesticide-free crops,” he says.

Another significant impact of the declaration has been on the general health of VDC residents, according to Rajan Adhikari, in-charge of the health post. “It’s probably halved the health problems here,” he says. “It costs Rs 2,022 to build a single toilet, but a household would have to spend, on an average, about Rs 7,000 on treatment for fecal- and urine-borne diseases otherwise.”

According to health post records, amoebic dysentery was the fourth most prominent health issue in the VDC last year, but this year it has whittled down to 14th. Similarly, diarrhea, which was at the 25th spot last year, with 24 cases, has dropped to the 30th, with a total of seven cases this year. And the VDC saw ten cases of typhoid last year, whereas not a single case has been diagnosed this year.

Despite the visible success of the campaign, the journey to this stage has not been easy, and there have been times when interventions had to be carried out in a number of areas. “There was one settlement where the residents still defecated in open grounds, public canals and fields,” Dhakal says. “With the help of schools, parties and the VDC, we took the open defecation area under control. We eventually succeeded in establishing toilets there.”

Political parties and intellectuals have also joined hands to enact a domestic law, which says that those not constructing toilets will not be given VDC grants, which has been endorsed in Jagatpur. And it is in this course that the citizens’ charter and code of conduct have been formulated. And this VDC is one of many within Chitwan where such activities have been going on over the last year, leading the district itself to be declared an Open Defecation-free District on September, 2011.

Basant Adhikari, Local Development Officer of Chitwan, says that for campaigns like this to work, the declaration needs to be sustainable and enforced properly. “We want political parties to issue a rule that the members of their working committees and members of the DDC’s users’ committees should build toilets in their own homes,” he says. “This should be the basis of deciding whether particular VDCs deserve grants.”

The campaign in Jagatpur, and indeed others in Chitwan at large, owe their success to the cooperation between the VDC administration, social organisations and of course, the locals. They changes brought about through this cooperation, in such a short period of time, have been truly commendable, and other districts would do well to take their cue from Chitwan.

Posted on: 2011-12-24 09:52

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