Toilet Heroines will be the pioneers

We can consider Anita Narre a heroine all right. Last May, she left her husband's home two days after her marriage because there was no indoor toilet. Eight days later she returned, after he had built a toilet, a move that cost him his savings and required support from the Panchayat.

Now, the NGO Sulabh International has adopted his village Jheetudhana, in Betul district, Madhya Pradesh for its "Total Cleanliness Drive". Sulabh also awarded Rs 5 lakh to Narre for her action, saying it will motivate other Indian girls, especially in villages, to ensure that when their parents arrange a match, they must ensure there is a toilet at their in-laws place.

In the same week that Narre was honoured, rural development Minister Jairam Ramesh expressed concern that the government's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is being seen as a "token sanitation campaign" and that woman were demanding mobile phones but not toilets.

The TSC campaign to build toilets in the districts free of cost had previously hit a roadblock as villagers thought it was "dirty" to have facilities inside the house. But Narre's action has changed this. Many nearby villages have requested the TSC to build toilets.

Women and girls in rural India suffer greatly due to the lack of basic sanitation. The lack of a girl's toilet is one of the top reasons girls drop out of school. A 2009 survey of India's schools found that fewer than half of them have restrooms. Of those, only 60 per cent had facilities for girls , many of which were broken or locked.

Women in rural India often wait until the night or dawn to relieve themselves discretely in fields, often risking sexual assault, kidnapping, and animal attacks. Some women eat and drink less, simply to avoid having to go to the toilet, putting themselves at a higher risk for malnutrition. Lack of toilets and other proper sanitation cost India nearly $54 billion a year through hygienerelated illnesses (malaria, polio, diarrhoea and typhoid), lost productivity and other factors, a World Bank study found. In 2005, the Haryana Government launched a "No Toilet No Bride" campaign to encourage more villagers to build toilets, plastering villages with posters saying "If you don't have a proper lavatory in your house, don't even think about marrying my daughter." The campaign resulted in 1.4 million new toilets.

Under new local laws in states, people's representatives are obliged to construct a flush toilet in their own home within a year of being elected. Those who fail to do so face dismissal. The law making toilets mandatory has been introduced in several states as part of the TSC. How far this succeeds in creating better facilities for women waits to be seen.

Delhi only has 132 public toilets for women, while there are 3,192 public toilets for men. And, never mind that men are raised to believe that their whole country is a toilet! Working women in Delhi's urban settlements say they don't have the time to stand in the endless lines and do a 'flying toilet' - evacuate in a plastic bag and then throw it in the trash. Where's the heroine for public toilets?