Giving villages a makeover

Gram Vikas has helped 350 villages in Orissa get toilets, bathrooms and round-the-clock piped water supply.

Tamana, a village at the foothills of Kerandimal, about 15 km from Orissa's Berhamput city in Ganjim district, is different from other tribal villages in the area. Almost all the families here have pucca houses with toilets and bathrooms and round-the-clock piped water supply.

"We are using toilets and bathrooms regularly," says Gurubari Mallick, a middle-aged woman. "Now we cannot stay in any of our relatives' villages (due to the lack of such civic amenities)," said another woman, Lalita Mallick. Water-borne and skin diseases are not as common in Tamana as in other villages in the area.

Tamana is one of the villages selected by Gram Vikas, a leading non-governmental organisation in Orissa. With Gram Vikas' help, social transformations like that in Tamana has been possible in 350 villages of 21 districts in the state.

"Our thrust areas are water and sanitation" said Joe Madiath, the executive director of Gram Vikas.

Gram Vikas was adjudged NGO of the Year 2006 in India recently by the London-based Resources Alliance and the Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation.

In the early 1990s, Gram Vikas conducted studies and found that over 80 per cent of disease-related cases and mortality in rural Orissa are due to the poor quality of drinking water. The quality of water, in turn, was related to callous attitude towards disposal of human waste, explained Madiath.

"A toilet-and-bathroom should be constructed in such a way that one is able to use it in a dignified manner," Madiath said, while expressing his dissatisfaction with the government-sponsored Swajaladhara and total sanitation campaign.

In order to motivate the locals to use pucca toilets, the NGO has launched the programme Movement and Action Network Transformation in Rural Areas (Mantra).

Under Mantra, each family contributes Rs 1,000 to a village corpus fund. Additionally, each family contributes labour and raw materials to construct individual toilet-and-bathroom and establish the water supply system. Gram Vikas provides only the material components.

Water from a bore-well is pumped to an overhead tank and piped to individual households, with connections to toilets, bathrooms and kitchens. The users pay a minimum tariff each month towards maintenance and electricity charges.

The corpus fund is not used.

Before construction, young men and women, working as unskilled labourers, are trained in masonry. On completion of training, they construct the toilets, bathrooms and overhead water tanks and later on, houses, with the assurance that they can work at least for a year if they desire.

"About 80 per cent of the males in our village become master masons and go to others states for construction work" said Satya Narayan Mallick, one of the villagers.

Gram Vikas was founded by a group of student volunteers under the leadership of Madiath, who came to Orissa as a member of the Young Students Movement for Development. It was registered in 1979 with an objective of 100 per cent inclusion of each family. The organisation won the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize, and Madiath was the winner of the Social Lifetime Achievement Award of the Red and White Bravery Awards from Godfrey Philips in 2005.

For more, visit www.gramvikas.org