Bornali Borah, a housewife in remote Holow Phukan village in Assam, no longer wakes up her mother-in-law during the wee hours of the morning when she wants to go out to defecate. Borah and other women of the village are now happy as each house has a toilet and it is being used. Borah's village has been declared 'open defecation-free' (ODF) as other villages in Lakwa block of the state's Sivasagar district.
"I am happy that we live like human beings now and do not go to the fields to defecate like animals. Before the toilets were constructed, all of us had to go out in the fields to relieve ourselves. The entire thing was disappointing but we did not have any solution," Bornali, in her early 30s, said.
The toilet constructed at Bornali's home is among 5,319 toilets in Lakwa block, funded by the state government and the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects of companies like ONGC and BCPL (Brahmaputra Crackers and Polymers Ltd). The entire initiative was supported by UNICEF.
A baseline study done by the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) in Lakwa in 2015 had revealed that toilet coverage was 35 percent and about 51 percent toilets were found to be unusable. Read more
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