The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Investment on toilets pays off

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Investment on toilets pays off

Alladi Jayasri

BANGALORE: Piles of solid waste have been raising a stink in Bangalore for the past three days because gram panchayat leaders have got together and said "Not In My Back Yard". They are tired of seeing the city's garbage accumulating in their villages.

They are not alone in enforcing basic standards of sanitation and cleanliness. Initiatives to prevent the dumping of garbage, ban plastics and encourage rainwater harvesting are being taken up in a big way across several gram panchayats in the State.

Three of the 121 gram panchayat presidents, who were in Delhi over the weekend to receive the Nirmal Gram Puraskar 2006-07, testified to this.

In Koppa Gram Panchayat in Chikmagalur district, president V.S. Umesh said, "When the initiative was launched on October 2, 2005, it seemed like a mountainous task."

He told The Hindu that the panchayat members got together health workers, anganwadi workers, schoolteachers, Stree Shakti groups, and non-governmental organisations to create awareness. "Some poor residents wondered why they should spend money on toilets when they could not pay hospital bills," Mr. Umesh said. Now, all the 1,251 households have a toilet, and this has won the gram panchayat Rs. 4 lakh as an award.

The spin-offs are several — attendance at schools has improved vastly, and best of all, a committee of four SHGs have built a tiny drinking water supply system under the Swajaladhara scheme of the Union Government. It cost Rs. 6.5 lakh and the committee contributed 10 per cent. The panchayat merely recommended the committee for the scheme, and it served 70 houses at Addala village. Rainwater harvesting is mandatory and 22 houses have already begun doing so.

K.V. Ratnakar, president of Konandur Gram Panchayat in Shimoga district, said: "We pretended that this was an election campaign, and each of the five villages had its own committee with specific responsibilities. The 1,117 homes were covered soon enough, and after that the panchayat decided to move on to garbage disposal and management." About 32 new garbage bins were added to the existing 19, the streets were swept every day, and the garbage taken out to a compost pit once in three days.

The panchayat has built four community toilets. The drainage system is being modernised, and streetlights installed. A campaign is on to reduce plastics consumption.

H.T. Abroo, Director, Department of Rural Water Supply and Sanitation, which is implementing the campaign, said, "We now have 14 per cent coverage for a population of about seven lakh."

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