-TheWire.in In villages where the number of households as per the baseline survey is less than the actual households, the toilet building exercise poses an allocation challenge: Who gets the limited number of toilets? Barabanki/ Meerut/ Lucknow/ Shamli: Usha Devi is 24, belongs to a so-called lower caste. She has five children, the eldest is seven-years-old and the youngest one month. Her husband works as a labourer at a brick kiln...
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In Several UP Villages, Toilets Exist Only on Paper -Kabir Agarwal
-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...
More »UP Is Fudging Numbers Under Swachh Bharat to Achieve 'Open Defecation Free' Goal -Kabir Agarwal
-TheWire.in An unverified claim on paper that each household that appears on a 2012 list, which may or may not include all households in the village, has a toilet built for use, is enough to declare the particular village ODF. Lucknow/ Barabanki: In late September, the second floor of Vikas Bhawan in Lucknow is buzzing with activity and smelling foul. The activity is centred around achieving cleaner sanitary facilities for the...
More »'When a brother goes down a sewer to clean it, we look the other way' -Sudha G Tilak
-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...
More »Four years after Swachh: cleaning excreta for roti in Rajasthan -Priscilla Jebaraj
-The Hindu A Rajasthan village is free of open defecation — on paper Behnara (Bharatpur District): The narrow village street is lined with gutters, dotted with excreta flushed out from latrines inside upper caste homes. Santa Devi pulls a corner of her sari over her mouth and begins to push the morning quota of waste into her metal basin using only a makeshift shovel and broom. Once she has thrown the...
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