Friday, March 22, 2013
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Asia’s first waterless toilet opens
People of Regullanka village set a precedence in personal hygiene, general cleanliness with ECOSAN toilet
- November 29th, 2012
Regullanka, a sleepy
village nestled in the flood-prone island mandal of Avanigadda in
Krishna district, has earned a rare distinction. For the first time in
Asia, residents of the entire village have embraced an innovative,
eco-friendly, waterless toilet – the ECOSAN toilet.
The village situated
on the banks of River Krishna achieved a new level of personal hygiene
and general cleanliness with an ECOSAN toilet.
Vijayawada-based NGO
Arthik Samata Mandal (ASM) implemented this project to save the local
women folk of the hardship of trekking a long distance to reach village
outskirts to answer nature’s call. The project is sponsored by
Switzerland-based Terre des Hommes (TDH).
“It took a long time
to persuade the villagers and secure their nod for construction of the
toilets with a promise that they will make use of them,” said ASM
secretary Nau Gora.
“Hundred and odd
families of Regullanka and its surrounding areas have a shallow water
table and villagers often face water scarcity. The ECOSAN toilets are a
safe bet for this region,” says Ms. Gora. It’s like killing two birds in
one shot.
The excreta which is
stored in a concrete chamber for six months and allowed to convert into
compost, was being diverted to the fields as fertilizers, said Willy
Bergogne, India Country Representative, of TDH.
He said that Regullanka had stood in the first in Asia to have implemented this project in the entire village.
Surrounded by a team
of local officials, villagers and representatives of many other
organisations, Mr. Bergogne and others opened the first ECOSAN toilet
vault.
The near 100 kg of
compost procured by breaking open the chamber was thin odourless powder.
“Use this as manure in the farm and the difference will reflect in the
output,” said Mr. Bergogne.
J. Satyapal Reddy,
Superintending Engineer, RWS, Krishna district, complimented the ASM and
the TDH for their achievement. Similar efforts by the government had
failed to convince villagers in the past, he said.
- Vijayawada-based NGO Arthik Samata Mandal has implemented the project
-
It took a long time to persuade villagers and secure their nod for ECOSAN toilet, says ASM secretary
-
Body waste that is stored in a concrete chamber for six months and allowed to convert into compost is diverted to fields as fertilizer
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Spotlight on sanitation for World Toilet Day
Epic Times, UNESCO, Nov 18, 2012
Aid agencies
and international groups are using this year's World Toilet Day to highlight
the risks to women and children from poor sanitation.
Since
2001, November 19 has marked World Toilet Day, drawing attention to issues of
toileting and sanitation worldwide. The United Nations says more than 2.7
million people die each year due to lack of sanitation, with almost 2,000
children dying each day from unsanitary conditions.
World Toilet Day
- More than 2.7 million people die each year due to lacking sanitation
- Most of those who die are under five years old.
- Each year, children miss a total of 272 million school days due to water-borne or sanitation-related diseases.
- Approximate 1.25 billion women and girls lack safe sanitation
- Only 1 in 3 people worldwide have access to suitable toilet facilities.
- More than 1 billion people
still defecate in the open.
- In her latest report to the UN General Assembly, Catarina de Albuquerque, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, has called for the elimination of inequalities in access to water and sanitation.
She's
told Radio Australia's Cconnect Asia program the problem extends beyond the
right to sanitation, to other rights including health,education , work and the
right to lead a life in dignity.
"It
is a crisis that we are facing, and since sanitation is a taboo issue, it's
something dirty that we want to hide, we don't want to talk about it, we don't
want to talk about it," she said.
"So
if we don't talk about and if we make a taboo around it, obviously it's very
difficult for governments to prioritise it in their policy and address this
problem."
It is a
crisis that we are facing, and since sanitation is a taboo issue, it's
something dirty that we want to hide, we don't want to talk about it, we don't
want to talk about it.
Catarina de Albuquerque, United
Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and
sanitation. The
United Nations says a lack of access to toilets remains an important source of
global inequality, with poor sanitation almost exclusively a burden of the
poor.
It says
lacking sanitation not only made poor people sick; it also shrank their already
limited possibilities by forcing them to stay away from school and work. Each
year, children miss a total of 272 million school days due to water-borne or
sanitation-related diseases.
"Each
time I go on a mission for the UN, I always visit a school, and I always talk
with the girls, and not having sanitation - not having girls' only toilets -
means after they reach puberty, they don't go to school - especially if they
have their period" she said. "And
I met some girls who tell me they miss school for one week a month...so you see
the dimensions of the tragedy."
Jane Caro
from international NGO WaterAid has told Radio Australia's Pacific Beat program
the aim of World Toilet Day is to bring the issue of sanitation out into the
open.
"As
long as we keep it hidden - partly because it's such a taboo, shameful kind of
subject still, shamefully - there isn't the same kind of pressure to provide
this kind of infrastructure as there is perhaps for other things," she
said.
"I
think it is that silence that has allowed this to go on, and avoid thinking
about it, and avoid, therefore, actually raising awareness, increasing
pressure...and generally just being more open about the issue, which is I think
the first step towards doing something about it."
WaterAid
says 1 in 3 women and girls do not have access to toilets, and unsafe or open
toilets increase the risks of physical and sexual violence. Ms Caro
says they've found World Toilet Day events such as 'Big Squat' flash mobs help
to raise awareness of the dangers through humour.
When I
started...to think about what it would be like to be a woman in a village where
there was no toilet - or only one - and where it was not only embarrassing to
reveal my needs, but possibly dangerous? It made me think."
"There's
an obvious way to get people to talk about it, and that is our tendency to have
'toilet humour' as part of the way we joke with one another," she said.
"I
actually think using some humour...[makes] people think, because that's what it
did for me when I started to know about this, was actually to think about what
it would be like to be a woman in a village where there was no toilet - or only
one - and where it was not only embarrassing to reveal my needs, but possibly
dangerous. It
made me think."
One
organisation working on the ground in Papua New Guinea is A-T Projects, which
uses local materials to develop toilets for schools and communities in in
Goroka Province.
Director
Miriam Layton says while some foreign aid helps in setting up proper
sanitation, more needs to be done by the local and PNG governments to improve
facilities.
She says
she hopes the new female governor of Eastern Highlands province will help drive
the push to improve sanitation needs for women. "In
our urban centres, as well as rural centres, there is no proper facilities to
cater for women's needs as well," she said.
"So
when women come for business in town, or for markets as well, they face problems
when looking for toilets, and that is when they are arrested and there's
violence.
"At
the moment we are still getting support from outside, no own government - so we
need to do a lot more work to convince the Papua New Guinea government, as well
as the donors, to do more in this area."
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Men in India are having a shitty time…
After years of squatting in open fields in darkness, braving snakes and
harassment from passing men, women in the central Indian state of Madhya
Pradesh have decided to f*ck this shit, threatening their future husbands with
the prospect of endless shame from being left at the alter, in exchange for decent toilets at home.
A lack of
toilets apparently is also the cause for girls dropping out of school
Only four in ten government schools in Delhi have access to functioning toilets
for girls, the study said, which played a dominant role in the ability of
female students to attend school.
The World
Bank says the lack of such facilities costs India nearly US$54 billion a year
in productivity and other losses — in large measure due to the impact on women.
The United Nations Development Programme says that fewer than 35% of women in
India get paid work.According to its conservative estimates, the gross domestic
product could easily increase by 2-4% annually if the employment rate for women
grows to 70%.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Why excreta matters
By Sunita
Narain, Down to Earth, Jan 31, 2012
Illustration: Karno
Guhathakurta Water is life and sewage tells its life story.
This is the subject
of the Citizens’ Seventh Report on the State of India’s Environment, Excreta Matters:
How urban India is soaking up water, polluting rivers and
drowning in its own excreta. It has a seemingly simple plot: it only asks where
Indian cities get their water from and where does their waste go. But this is
not just a question or answer about water, pollution and waste. It is about the
way Indian cities (and perhaps other parts of the world that are similarly
placed) will develop. It is about the paradigm of growth that’s sustainable and
affordable.
Urbanisation
in India, relentless as it is, will only grow. How should the country manage
its water needs so that it does not drown in its own excreta? This is what the
Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has asked and tried to answer in the
book. What has amazed us is the lack of data, research and understanding of
this issue in the country. This is when water concerns all. People in cities
get water in their houses; they discharge waste; and they see their rivers die.
But they don’t make the connection, between flushing toilet and dying rivers.
It is as if they do not want to know. But they should.
Is this a
reflection of the caste system of Indian society, where removing waste is
somebody else’s business? Or is it a reflection of current governance systems,
where water and waste are government’s business, and within that the business
of a lowly water and sanitation bureaucracy? Or is it simply a reflection of
Indian society’s extreme arrogance—it believes it can fix it all as and when it
gets rich; that water scarcity and waste are only a temporary problem; that
once it gets rich, infrastructure will be built, water will flow and the
embarrassing stink of excreta in cities will just disappear.
It is
clear Indians know little about the water they use and the waste they
discharge. We at CSE had to collect data the hard way—city by city, ferreting
out the material from government offices, which are rarely visited by
researchers. The second volume—71 cities: water-excreta survey—of the seventh
citizens’ report puts together individual city profiles. Each city is mapped to
know more about its past, current and future water footprint. Each city is
mapped to know more about where the waste generated from such use of water
goes. It is a geography lesson that’s essential to learn.
It was
way back in the late 1990s that environmentalist Anil Agarwal, who conceived
and crafted the State of India’s Environment reports, had said one needs to
understand the political economy of defecation, where the rich are subsidised
to excrete in convenience.
Now when
we researched for this report, which explains the political economy of
defecation, we were struck by one fact that should make us all angry, really
angry. We found countless instances where a city’s drain, called nullah today,
was actually a river. Delhi residents are familiar with Najafgarh drain, which
discharges the city’s waste into the Yamuna. But most of them do not know that
this “drain” has its source in the lake Sahibi. Now Sahibi is gone, and what
has replaced it in living memory is a drain carrying only filth, not water.
Worse, New Gurgaon is now dumping its sewage into the same Najafgarh jheel
(lake).
Buddha
Nullah in Ludhiana is referred to as a drain because it is that—full of stench
and filth. But not so long ago Buddha was called darya (river). It was a clean
freshwater stream. One generation has changed its form and name.
The Mithi
is Maximum City’s shame. When floods drowned Mumbai in 2005, it learnt it had a
clogged drain called Mithi, marred by encroachments. It did not realise that
the Mithi had not shamed the city, the city had shamed the Mithi. This “drain”,
which originates near the city, is really a river. It was recognised as a
river. It flowed like one. But today even official environmental status report
calls this living river a storm water drain. One more city has lost its river.
These lost rivers are our collective shame.
Friday, July 4, 2008
India woman leaves home for lack of toilet
Anita Narre
A newlywed woman in a village in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has won her struggle to have a toilet at her husband's home. Anita Narre left husband Shivram's home two days after her marriage in May last year because the house had no toilet.
She returned eight days later after Shivram, a daily wage worker, built one with savings and aid from villagers.An NGO announced a $10,000 reward for Mrs Narre for her "brave" decision and forcing her husband to build a toilet.
"It is not nice for women to go outside to defecate. That's why every home should have a toilet. Those who don't should make sure there is one," Mrs Narre told the BBC. Many people in India do not have access to flush toilets or other latrines.
But under new local laws in states including Chhattisgarh, 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 "sanitation for all" drive by the Indian government.
The programme aims to eradicate the practice of open defecation, which is common in rural and poor urban areas of India. Special funds are made available for people to construct toilets to promote hygiene and eradicate the practice of faeces collection - or scavenging - which is mainly carried out by low-caste people.
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