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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In Several UP Villages, Toilets Exist Only on Paper -Kabir Agarwal

In Several UP Villages, Toilets Exist Only on Paper -Kabir Agarwal

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published Published on Oct 5, 2018   modified Modified on Oct 5, 2018
-TheWire.in

The government claims 99% of Uttar Pradesh is open defecation free, but the ground reality shows this assertion is far from the truth.

Lucknow/ Barabanki/ Meerut/ Shamli:
Hetampur is a small village of about 1,200 people in central Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district, located 50 kilometres from the state capital Lucknow. The village has been declared open defecation free (ODF) under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin).

Urmila is a resident of the village. She is 60, short and skinny. Sitting outside her one-room house of brick walls and earthen floor, she is peeling potatoes for dinner for a family of five – her husband, son, his wife and their three-year-old daughter.

Does the family have a toilet? “What toilet? We didn’t get anything,” she quipped, and added that she has bigger concerns. “We don’t have a gas cylinder. We don’t have a ration card. We have to watch over our field 24 hours because of the menace of stray cattle.”

Urmila argues that building a toilet figures very low on her list of priorities. “Khet mein jaate hain subah-subah. Kya dikkat hai? Ration nahi milta, cylinder nahi hai. Wo dikkat hai (We go in the fields early morning. What is the problem? We don’t get ration, we don’t have a cylinder. Those are problems).”

Across the street from Urmila’s house lives Mohammed Ismail with his family of five. He too does not have a toilet in his house and everyone in the family defecates in the open. “We have contacted the pradhan many times. But nothing has happened,” Ismail said.

The family would like to have a toilet that it can use and not have to defecate in the open. “It is a major problem for women to go out in the open. It is demeaning and there is also the issue of safety,” said Quresha Bano, Ismail’s wife.

Late last month, The Wire visited about 50 households of the 200 in the village and found toilets only in ten. Some toilets remained incomplete. The households that had access to finished toilets claimed to be using them.

According to the Swachh Bharat’s (Gramin) database, the village has been verified open defecation free. The verification process, as The Wire has reported earlier, is not independent. The SBM guidelines suggest that independent third-party verifications or cross-district verifications be carried out. However, the guidelines have not been followed and teams from the district office are carrying out verifications in their own districts. There are cases where no verification has taken place whatsoever.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 5 October, 2018, https://thewire.in/government/uttar-pradesh-open-defecation-free-swachh-bharat


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