India unveils cheap new village toilets
6 Sep BBC
An Indian charity has unveiled 108 new lavatories in a village which
gained notoriety when two young girls were found hanged from a tree
there in May.
The teenage cousins were killed in Katra Sahadatganj in Uttar Pradesh
when they went unaccompanied to relieve themselves in the fields.
Campaigners say the lack of toilets and the need to walk long distances
makes women vulnerable to attack.Nearly half of India's 1.2 billion
people have no toilets at home.
Unveiling the brightly-coloured, cheap lavatories on Sunday, the
sanitation charity Sulabh International said it aimed to provide the
same facility for every dwelling in India.I believe no woman must lose
her life just because she has to go out to defecate,” Bindeshwar Pathak,
founder of the charity, said.Our aim is to provide a toilet to every
household in the country in the not-too-distant future,” Mr Pathak told
the AFP news agency.The circumstances of the murder of the two young
cousins in Katra Sahadatganj remain unclear.
But they were killed when they - like countless other girls and women
- walked to the fields in the dark, for privacy, to relieve
themselves.In his Independence Day speech on 15 August, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi vowed to end open defecation.We are in the 21st Century
and yet there is still no dignity for women as they have to go out in
the open to defecate and they have to wait for darkness to fall,” he
said.Can you imagine the number of problems they have to face because of
this?” he asked. |