Equity in School Water and Sanitation

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EQUITY IN SCHOOL WATER AND SANITATIONroads. The primary school has child friendly,functional and clean toilets for both boys and girls(including for pre-school children).However, a few years ago MS1 was different.There was no system for garbage disposal in thevillage, including there being no system fordisposal of sanitary napkins/rags, which wereburied in fields by girls and women. Even theprimary and upper primary schools were not thesame, both in terms of school infrastructure andpractices three years ago. With no properWATSAN facilities, both the schools were notproperly maintained. Earlier, there was a cleardiscrimination in the seating arrangementsbetween OBC and SC children in the school.Further, monitoring of sanitary practices in thevillage was not as meticulous as it is today.The community gives the credit for these changesin the school as well as in the village environmentto the current lady pradhan's husband, referred tolocally as the Pradhan Patim, who represents herand plays an active role in village governance witha special commitment to sanitation and villagedevelopment. With joint efforts of the pradhan, thegovernment-appointed sanitation motivator andmembers of the village community, all thehabitations are now clean and devoid of garbage,the usual litter, and cattle excreta. A paid sweepercomes once a week to clear the bins, pile thegarbage into a dump and burn it. The communityis fully aware of sanitation related issues in thevillage, and also supports school sanitation.Sanitation practices and toilet usage are beingmonitored by the village committee, the pradhan,the women's self-help group (SHG), the childrenand vigilant youth. Sanitation is an important issuein the village; it is regularly included in Panchayatdiscussions. The villagers are averse to defecationin the open and monitor this closely in the night orearly morning, using torches and whistles. Theyouth are particularly active in this regard.The toilets in the schools are clean and well usedand the children appeared to be habituated tousing and cleaning them. Toilet usage and cleaninghabits of the children were also evident in thehomes during the village visits. In the primaryschool the water facility was through a force lifthand pump that supplied clean potable water towashbasins with taps for hand washing. The drainfrom the hand pump platform is linked to thecovered drain of the village. There is a garbagebin at the rear end of the school in which thechildren put in the daily garbage, which is cleanedby the sweeper every week. A submersibleelectrical pump is also linked to hand pump pipes.Children were seen to be washing their hands withsoap after using the toilet, before the midday mealand after cleaning the campus. School childrenteach this to their younger siblings and parentstoo. They have a committee that organizes themidday meal, including supervision of seatingarrangements and cleaning up after the meal. Nogender/caste-based segregation is visible inclassroom practices or between the haves andhave-nots. Children know about scabies and keeptheir affected classmates segregated. They arealso aware of various sources of potable water,the difference between clean and dirty water,harmful effects of using dirty water and the benefitsof using toilets, etc.This village has been able to sustain its practicesfor sanitation and hygiene in the community andthe school due to awareness, education and theinvolvement of community members in the effort.The school and the children have no doubt beenthe pivot of learning, but the positives have beentransferred to their homes and the community.Apart from this, facilitative infrastructure like drains,garbage bins, roads and water availability, andappointment of a sweeper in the village, have alsocontributed to making a difference.Along with the services, the demography of thevillage too has been a crucial factor impacting uponthe effectiveness of the efforts made. With onlytwo major caste groups living in the village, thereis evidently not much social conflict. The agency ofthe pradhan has been critical in making peopleaware and educated about sanitation and forproviding the infrastructure and spending fundsallocated for its construction and maintenance. Thebest advocacy for this village is provided by a youngman who does wall paintings not only in this villagebut also in other villages of the block. He advisespeople to come to his village to see the positiveimpact of total sanitation: ‘Hamare gaon me aaoaur dekho (come and see our village).’22
Overcoming Exclusion and Discrimination in South AsiaIndia Country Report4.3.2 When things go wrongLS5 is a village in Jakhora block of Lalitpur district.The village has a mixed population with the highercaste living in the heart of the village and 150 SCand ST households living on the periphery. Theprimary and upper primary schools located in thesame campus have adequate sanitation facilities;the former has three urinals (built by WaterAid)and three toilets, of which one remains locked forthe teachers. All of them are dirty, choked andunusable. Another toilet unit funded by SSA isunder construction. There is a force lift hand pumpto fill the tanks over the toilets which has not beenoperational for a long time as its pipe work hasbeen stolen. Consequently, there is no water eitherin the toilets or in the washbasins. The upperprimary school too has one old toilet unit (built byWaterAid) and even this is extremely dirty andunused. There is another girls’ toilet built underthe government's National Programme ofEducation for Girls at Elementary Level(NPEGEL). This is locked and reserved mainlyfor teachers. The girl students can use it aftergetting the teacher’s permission and getting thekey. The area near the toilets remains littered withgarbage and sanitary towels, and has not beencleaned for some time. There is just one handpump, but this is not operational. The only sourceof water for the school campus is one hand pumpnear the primary section. Children from forwardcastes refrain from touching this hand pump, andinstead go across the road to use another pump.The attendance on the day of visit was 20 per centof those enrolled. The teachers (all of them fromforward castes) spoke of how the village ispolarized on caste lines. In particular, they talkedabout the Sahariya community (see Box 3). Twoteachers stated that the children from thiscommunity were ‘not intelligent’, adding that incomparison to Brahmins they were ‘reallybackward’. All the children from Classes 1 to 5sat in the same room. In the upper primary school,though, children sat in any classroom (there wasno class-wise grouping of students) and someboys used caste/occupation names for theirclassmates. While the students (boys and girls)said that it was important to maintain casteidentities, they were accepting of teachers of allcastes because ‘teachers are equal to God (wohdevata samaan hain)’. The girls said that theymake friends with girls of all castes but do notshare food or water with everyone. Several forwardcaste children do not eat the meal cooked in theschool, and some of them even throw the foodout of the window. However, it is not clear if theythrow the meal because it is inedible (full ofworms!) or because of the lower caste of the cook.The teachers, too, bring their food from home andask only forward caste girls to fetch water for them.The village community is polarized on casteissues, particularly regarding the Sahariyacommunity, and the village leaders and teacherssaid that children from this community were notregular in attending school and that the girls weremarried very early (see Figure 1 for caste-wiseenrolment in senior secondary schools). TheSahariya community is ostracized and the rest ofthe village keeps its distance from them. Theschool, therefore, mirrors the social dynamics ofthe village and the teachers have not been able tochange the situation in schools as they subscribeto the same views.Figure 1 Caste-wise enrolment in senior secondary schools23%50 %24 %60%0%4%SCSTMuslim/MinOBC0 %4%13%Gen22%GirlsBoys23
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