PATNA: Women in the flood-hit areas of Bihar are battling shame every day.
The issue is a dearth of toilets to relieve themselves since their houses, as well as open spaces, remain submerged in flood waters.
Right now, around six million — settled in 20 out of the state’s 38 districts — have been impacted by the floods.
The worst affected are the women who are left with few options to ease themselves.
With the number of boats scarce and surrounding areas submerged in waist to neck-deep water, the sight of females wrapping themselves with polythene sheets and standing in the flowing water to relieve themselves brings shame to many.
“But what can they [women] do? They have no choice. The government is yet to rise to the occasion,” Sanjay Kumar Singh of Bidupur village from flood-affected Samastipur district told Gulf News on Friday. “They [women] battle shame and shock every day. They defecate in the same water, bathe in the same water and also drink the same water as they have no choice,” he added.
Some villagers, however, have made makeshift platforms on half-submerged trees and access these by boats to attend nature’s call. This facility, however, is not available to everyone.
“We have been facing this situation almost every year for decades, yet no permanent arrangement for community toilets has been made till date,” complains Krishna Yadav of Raghopur in Vaishali, another north Bihar district badly affected by floods.
Millions of individual household toilets, sanitary complexes and courtyard toilets have been constructed in Bihar under the Total Sanitation Campaign, a national programme aimed at the eradication of open defecation by making toilet facilities available at a household level and bring improvement to the general quality of life in rural areas, but most of them are flooded. The TSC which has been in implementation in the country since 1999 is the only programme that is dedicated to toilets.
As per an official report, more than 4.4 million individual toilets, 877 sanitary complexes, 84,499 school toilets and 52,226 courtyard toilets have been constructed in Bihar until January this year but a majority of these structures are of no use today since they are flooded. The government had been giving monetary assistance of Rs 3,200 to every poor family living below the poverty line for the construction of such toilets.
Still, the condition of many of the constructed toilets has not been found to be in good shape and are also deemed usable by WaterAid, a UK-based NGO working in 22 countries on water and sanitation which carried out an assessment of Bihar’s performance in this programme. WaterAid has been working in India since 1986. “The wuality of construction emerges as a major issue to be addressed as in many placesl. People from even the poorest of the poor communities such as Dalits (downtrodden class) find the constructed toilets unusable. Hence, a strong mechanism for monitoring construction quality needs to be devised and put in place,” says a survey report of the WaterAid.
WaterAid studied TSC performance in Bihar and conducted primary survey in Vaishali and Nalanda districts. Of them, Nalanda is the home district of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.
