Toilets and Urinals

In the early hours, the villagers of Khalabari, a tribal-dominated village in the Dumuripadar gram panchayat of Koraput district in Odisha step out of their houses for bringing wood and drinking water. The road to the forest where the water is available is rocky.

Concerned with contaminated water sources in rural areas, the Centre plans to provide piped water supply (classified as an improved water source by the W

“Earlier, I'd wait till sunset to answer nature's call. In the morning, I'd wait for others to return from the fields so I could go. Quite often, I had to miss school for this very reason. And I'm grown up now; so having a toilet in the house has become a must," says class IX student Jyoti Gaud, a resident of Tiktha Mussallepur village in Jagatpur.

It’s complicated! That should pretty much sum up the relationship between WASH strategies and nutrition outcomes. Obviously, when there are unsafe water, pitiable and inadequate sanitation conditions with woeful hygiene practices, it will inadvertently lead to public health implications.

Sanitation is the name given to the process, facilities and services employed towards the safe disposal of human waste which includes faeces and urine.

As a child back in the village, I had always cherished the sight of clear water running below bridges. But moving to Chennai, the car windows are always drawn up and the car zooms across bridges in a bid to avoid the stench emanating from the river. This begs the question, why are we in urban India so deprived of a clean environment?

Does gender matter when it comes to sanitation? Apparently, it does.

Faecal sludge management or FSM is a management system that safely collects, transports, and treats faecal sludge (also called septage) from pit latrines, septic tanks or other onsite sanitation facilities (OSSF).

It was September 2008. It took me almost two-and-a-half hours to reach G-plot, one of the remotest islands among the deltoid labyrinth of Sundarbans. My colleague, a native of G-plot, was waiting to receive me at the jetty.

The current set of government programmes such as Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) have gone a long way in improving access to water and sanitation services in India.