“Why have you got me a groom whose family cooks, eats and defecates in the same house?” asks a young, newly-married girl as she complains to her mother on the mobile about her in-laws. While her husband is unable to persuade her to use the toilet in the house, it is a teacher who ultimately manages to motivate her to do that.

The above is a scene from a street play put up by the students of Rajkiya Adarsh Madhya Narvar Bhagiratha School in Sarangpur village, Kochhus block of Rohtas district, Bihar. They are part of a campaign to free people from defecating in the open. Though the skit enacts a story contrary to the real-life one of a girl in Uttar Pradesh who refused to marry into a household without a toilet, the message is loud and clear.

The headmaster of the school, Bharat Prasad Singh, details the number of activities the young swachhata (cleanliness) champions have undertaken to free their village of open defecation. They have been literally begging, pleading, urging and insisting that the village folk, including their parents, give up the habit of defecating in the fields.

“It is not about bricks and mortar, it is about the community. And unless people come forward to make their village open defecation-free, motivation in the form of money or other pressures cannot work.” Once this realisation dawned, the focus of the campaign was shifted to community mobilisation and creating demand, moving away from a contract-driven, supply-mode campaign, recalls the district magistrate of Rohtas, Animesh Kumara Parasar.

A lifestyle change

Coalitions called ‘Satyagrah kendras’ to discourage open defecation were set up in schools, panchayats or in the residence of the village head. These became the fulcrum of activity to get the community charged into making a lifestyle change, says Parasar.

From entertaining, educating, glorifying to shaming, every trick in the book was used to motivate or covertly pressurise the people and get them to construct toilets in the district. It included declaring a village ‘ kachhara gaon’ (garbage village) by the ‘people’s cleanliness courts’ and mock honouring people who did not comply. Many villagers were pushed this way into voluntarily constructing toilets. They did not want the dignity of the village to be compromised.

Members of the monitoring committees that were formed had the toughest job. They had to keep vigil on the violators in the wee hours of the morning without receiving a remuneration, say Kuchila village ward member Sitamoni and master motivator Sandeep Kumar Srivastava. While their efforts are beginning to bear fruit in terms of behavioural change, the biggest pain point is that payment promised by the administration has so far not been received by the villagers who borrowed money on interest to construct toilets. In Kuchila, people sold their goats or cattle for the purpose. Many even borrowed from money lenders. Some have not been able to complete the construction of toilets due to lack of funds and others have been forced to use jute sacks as walls of the toilet.

The administration had taken the decision to make the mandated ₹12,000 payment for beneficiaries only after the toilets are constructed. But that too has not happened. Many villagers said they have not received the funds even after they completed construction of their toilets a year ago. The delay, district officials say, is because the process of payment starts only when 75 per cent of the households in a ward complete the construction of toilets. According to official records, payment so far has been made to 29 per cent of the beneficiaries in the district.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi

Published on April 20, 2018