In this Telangana village, 37 toilets built in 48 hours

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By the time the clock ticks towards October 2, the anniversary of the launch of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Sircilla in Telangana will be the first constituency in India with toilets for all its households. Construction has been on on a war footing for the past 20 days, with the Centre putting up 70 per cent of the money and the Telangana government pitching in with the rest.

“Every household in the constituency, with 92 villages, has a toilet now. Villagers have pledged they will use them and stop open defecation,” Sircilla MLA and Minister for IT and Panchayati Raj K T Rama Rao says.

Among the Lambada women putting the finishing touches to their toilets in Bhongulakidi Thanda, Bhanoth Sheela can’t hide her smile. “I am 30 and have never seen a toilet. Wednesday we started building 10 toilets — one for each household — with funds and material received from the government. We will never ever go out in the open again.”

The 10 households do not have space for individual toilets, so six are being built on a piece of land given by the government, with the remaining four adjacent to it. Each toilet is earmarked to a family and it can keep it locked.

B Narasava, 35, remembers the time she went to relieve herself in a field at night and was bitten by a snake. It was a miracle she survived, she says, as her 20-year-old neighbour had died of a cobra bite in the same field earlier. She and 155 other families in Jillella village have now been spared that trip, she says.

“Snakes and scorpions were only one issue,” adds B Padma, a fellow villager. “It was also embarrassing as someone could pass by, or the owner of the field or land could start shouting at you.”

Guntapalli Cheruvu village doesn’t have a proper approach road still, but toilets will relieve some of its pain. “All houses have dish TV but no toilet. It was embarrassing. I used to dread going out,” Mudavath Swapna says.

The village also passed a resolution on September 30 that anyone found defecating in the open would be fined Rs 500. “Not only that, villagers will now whistle to gather a crowd to embarrass such offenders. We may be illiterate but we are serious about making our village open-defecation free,” says sarpanch M Prakash.

M Madhu, sarpanch of Jillela village, who is an M.Tech, says the response has been overwhelming. Each individual household latrine costs Rs 12,000 to construct. “In a majority of the cases, the families were too poor to build one. Some don’t have space for a toilet, but all of them pleaded for one under the scheme.”

Sircilla BDO C Madhu Mohan says if there is no space, people are opting for a toilet at the nearest land available. “It may be a part of their field or a piece of panchayat land. They don’t mind walking a few yards. We have built 12,505 toilets.”

Mohan adds that they identified 371 women who were living alone — mostly widows — who had to walk up to 1 km to relieve themselves, to give them a toilet on a priority basis.

Balasani Garvanamma, 88, whose husband passed away 30 years ago, fought with panchayat officials in Sarampalli village, to get a toilet for her dilapidated home. “I walked 1 km daily early in the morning to the fields. I may or may not live long but I want a toilet inside my house,” she says.