It Takes a Village
WINNER: Swades Foundation WHY IT WON: For bringing sanitation and hygiene to rural India, especially for women and schoolgoing girls
IN 2004, RONNIE SCREWVALA produced Swades, a film in which Shah Rukh Khan played a NASA scientist who gives up his cushy life in the US to live in and help a village in India. Ronnie, with wife Zarina Screwvala, is doing something similar with their Swades Foundation, whose mission is to empower a million rural Indians every five years, with water and sanitation being one of the four key fields for its community development programmes.
In the six years since its founding, Swades has done work in areas of education, health and economic development, covering nearly 2,513 hamlets in seven blocks of Maharashtra’s Raigad district. Their work in sanitation is in keeping with the government’s vision of an open defecation-free India. “Our mission was that all of the 120,000 households we work with should have a toilet attached. Each of the 22,000 toilets we’ve built in the past four years is being used, as the community feels it owns it,” say the founders. Swades has constructed toilets in 22,442 homes, impacting 96,500 people and set up committees to ensure their proper usage and maintenance. “The issues of water and sanitation are connected and we have implemented both simultaneously,” say Ronnie and Zarina. Their work has also impacted 47,000 students in 156 schools with 20 or more students, who now have access to drinking water and toilets. This will, in turn, result in fewer girls dropping out of schools, reduction in cases of diseases and privacy and security for women and the elderly. Swades’s biggest strength, however, lies in its thousands of volunteers and over 300 employees ensuring that toilets are no longer a ‘luxury’ for the privileged.