Last month, all 4,480 villages in 52 districts spanning five states on the banks of the Ganga — Uttarakhand, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal — were declared Open Defecation Free under the Namami Gange project.
Of the 200 households along the ghats of the Ganga at Dalmau nagar panchayat in Rae Bareli, there are still about 50 without toilets. But residents say the change that has come about in the lives of people like Rajwati has convinced them to push for a future free of open defecation. “My husband, who was a priest at the ghat, died eight years ago. Since then, I have managed to put my five daughters through school and get three of them married. But if you ask me, the biggest achievement is having built a toilet at my home… and it is connected to a septic tank as well,” says Rajwati.
Until six months ago, Rajwati and her daughter Anjali used to be the last of the 27 families to set up their puja stall on the Ganga ghat in UP’s Dalmau panchayat. In March, they got a toilet at home — and their lives changed. “All these years, we had to wake up early and rush to the field. Setting up a stall in time was impossible. Now, we are the first to reach the ghat,” says Rajwati, a 48-year-old widow and mother of five girls.
Read more of this in an excellent report by Mallica Joshi published in The Indian Express...
