YASMIN ALI HAQUE AQUE
When students in a district of Chattisgarh learned about the sanitation crisis, 1.38 lakh of them wrote letters to their parents to motivate them to build toilets in their homes, and sanitation coverage in the district increased by 25%. When 85,000 students in the capital of Gujarat came together to rank sanitation levels in their schools and made the list public, communities stepped up effort to build toilets. When 13-year-old Lavanya from Karnataka staged a protest to demand a toilet for every house in her village, the Zilla Panchayat fulfilled her demand. When five students from Tata College in Jharkhand returned home and found sanitation lacking in their blocks, they galvanized support for toilet construction and use, and monitored progress so successfully that soon after, some communities had a toilet in each home.
These inspiring young people saw the world differently from the generations before them. They saw the problems that their communities faced, understood what needed to be done, and took action to galvanize communities into becoming open-defecation free.
Significant progress has been made to reduce levels of open defecation in the South Asian region since 1990, and there is still much work to be done.
In 2014, India was home to 90% of the south Asians who practiced open defecation and if nothing was done, many of the 26 million children born every year would have grown up in an unhygienic environment.
The problems caused by open defecation are not as well-known as they should be. When people defecate in the open, instead of in safely-managed toilets, human waste contaminates everyone’s water and food. This is not just unpleasant but also potentially deadly. Open defecation means that diseases such as cholera, polio, and hepatitis are spread more easily. It means that children are at a higher risk of diarrhoea, which in turn leads to malnutrition..
Each day, 320 children under the age of five die from diarrhoea in India. That’s one child, one daughter or son, every five minutes. Children who survive grow up to be smaller and weaker than they