Equity in School Water and Sanitation

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