FLUSHING OUT A STIGMA
In June 2017, when newly-wed Anuradha reached her in-laws’ home in Gajipur village in Bihar’s Nawada district, she was shocked to learn that while the family owned a car, they had not built a toilet in their house. Both her father and her husband, Kundan Kumar, a BTech employed in Delhi, had not revealed this fact to her before the wedding.
Forced to defecate in the open, the feisty young woman protested, fought with her husband and shifted to her parent’s home until a toilet was built. But her demand faced opposition from the entire village. The aversion to toilets was rooted in the superstition that building a toilet at home would bring misfortune. So much so that the entire village did not have a single toilet. Even the facility at the government primary school had been sealed by villagers with brick and sand.
“In the eighties, two families in the village constructing toilets lost their sons to sudden illness. It created fear that building a toilet would bring misfortune,” says Shyam Sundar Singh, a villager. “Then in 2016, the block development officer, Radha Raman Murari, who was motivating villagers to build toilets, met with an accident. This strengthened our fears further.”
The entire village had accepted the ‘tradition’ of making do without toilets at home. The panchayat had even demarcated open defecation zones for men and women. “Women had to leave their homes before sunrise, when it’s still dark. It was horrible,” recalls Anuradha.
In August 2017, Kaushal Kumar, a young IAS officer, took over as the district magistrate of Nawada. “I was surprised to learn about the tradition in the village. But we handled it sensitively as the superstition was strong and deep-rooted,” he says.
Kaushal visited the village with district officials and interacted with the people. The exercise was done regularly. “It took a few months to convince villagers to build toilets,” says Naushad Ahmed Sidiqqui, the block development officer of Akbarpur. Soon, government agencies got involved in the construction of toilets. The first one came up at the house of Anuradha’s in-laws in November 2017. Soon all families followed suit. Today, every house in the village has a toilet. Gajipur has been declared open defecation-free.