It takes 60 steps for Vitto Pandey to reach the toilet. She cannot make that journey alone over uneven land. Sometimes, she waits for hours for someone to hold her hand and walk with her. “I keep falling. I fall and I get up. Once, I was hit by a bull and for weeks my body was swollen,” she says. Vitto, who is visually impaired since birth, is usually taken to the toilet by her brother’s wife, Geeta. “Sometimes I am in the middle of other work when she calls out. It is a problem,” says Geeta, who herself uses the fields. “There is no running water in the toilet, so it gets very dirty. It is a useless toilet,” she says. Her husband Sanatak is the youngest of Vitto’s three brothers. He farms on their one bigha (around 0.6 acres) land in their village, Bakhari, in Lucknow district’s Gosaiganj block. Many of the 203 toilets in Bakhari, of which most are located far from the living quarters, are crumbling and in no shape to be used. The lack of access to even a rudimentary toilet has meant prolonged stretches of self-control, long walks, and frequent humiliation for the village residents. Tarawati Sahu, a homemaker, remembers countless times when she had an upset stomach, and defecated in front of someone’s house while hurrying to the fields. “It is very shameful. The neighbours give us dirty looks. When my stomach is upset and I can’t control myself, I sometimes wash the streets where I defecate, five times a day,” she says. At 65, the five-minute trek to the fields is a difficult journey for her. Her 72-year-old husband Mata Prasad Sahu, who is too ill to work in their three bighas of farmland, faces similar problems. “We have folded our hands before so many, but no one has paid attention to us. I am tired of asking for a toilet,” she says.

PHOTO • Puja Awasthi PHOTO • Puja Awasthi

And yet, Bakhari – a village of 190 households, around 25 kilometres from Lucknow city – is counted in Uttar Pradesh’s claim of achieving 100 per cent coverage of household toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Launched in October 2014 by the central government’s Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, the Mission aims to achieve total sanitation in the country. Bakhari’s tryst with toilets, however, began several years before the SBM was launched. In 2009, when Mayawati was the state’s chief minister, the village was chosen for the Dr. Ambedkar Gram Sabha Vikas Yojana (AGSVY), a scheme of the Uttar Pradesh government, which included provision of clean toilets. Five other mandatory objectives were to be achieved: electrification, link roads, drains, drinking water and housing. The toilet used by Vitto was among the 170 built in Bakhari under the scheme, for which the village was selected on the basis of 18 parameters – a sizeable population of Scheduled Castes being one of them. Of Bakhari’s 917 residents, Census 2011 listed 381 who belonged to SC communities. But Bakhari’s inclusion in the AGSVY scheme became its undoing when the SBM, in its baseline survey in 2012, identified the households eligible for toilets. Since the village was supposed to have received its share of toilets under the AGSVY, it was left out of the SBM list. Ambar Singh, the elected pradhan of the Bakhari gram sabha, says that he tried to get some funds from the SBM to repair the toilets built under the AGSVY – including the crumbling Pandey household toilet. “But nothing can be done after it is locked,” he says. By ‘locked’ Singh means the record in the SBM’s database, which tracks the Mission’s progress. If the record says that toilets have already been constructed in a village, no more funds can be released for new ones.

Caught between the claims of two schemes, Bindeshvari’s family too has no option but to use a rickety loo, with the bricks coming loose: 'It seems as though it will fall on me'



In Bakhari though, the toilets have turned into an equaliser for people of different castes and varying economic status. The quality of the toilet built for Bindeshvari’s landless family from a Scheduled Caste, was the same as that constructed for the household of Ram Chandra Pandey, a 62-year-old Brahmin farmer. Although no one in the village recalls the cost of a toilet built under the AGSVY scheme, many remember that 300 bricks were used for each. Some who could afford it got toilets built on their own. Ram Chandra, who has 2.8 acres of land in the village, thought the quality of his toilet was so poor, that he spent Rs. 4,000 of his own money to improve the structure. “There was a tin sheet for the door. It blew away one night,” he recounts. The only person now using the toilet in his household of seven is his seven-year-old granddaughter. “If everyone in the family used it, it would have become completely useless many years ago,” he adds.

PHOTO • Puja Awasthi PHOTO • Puja Awasthi