A day in the life of...

Rajeev Rajan, Project Coordinator for WaterAid's partner, Integrated Development Foundation in Bihar.

Credit: WaterAid / Ian Bray

"There isn't really a typical day for me as problems constantly crop up. You might say this is the challenge of daily life in India! I get to the head office in Patna at 9am and quickly catch up with colleagues and any correspondence that needs dealing with.

By 9.30 I'm on the road. Driving a small motorcycle on the road out of Patna is arduous and pretty dangerous. It may be the national highway but it is also very dusty, in desperate need of repair and the traffic follows Darwin's law of survival of the fittest. A motorcycle is very much at the lower end of the pecking order!

It's a 25 kilometre ride to our latrine production workshop where we run training courses in masonry, latrine construction and hygiene. We're running a sanitation and hygiene project in the surrounding villages and the workshop acts as a centre for us. We focus on building local women's confidence so that they become agents of change.

Bihar is known as the bimaru state - the illness state - and the level of safe sanitation is worse here than in any other part of India. The villages around our workshop are testament to this.

The people who live in the surrounding villages are mostly landless and make a living by working on other people's farms. They don't earn much. Typically a woman would earn about 25 to 30 rupees a day and a man slightly more, maybe as high as 35 rupees. It's harvest time now so they can earn up to 50 rupees a day.

Including all of the materials such as the cement for the rings, the cheapest a latrine will cost is 600 rupees. That's about two weeks wages, so it's a big outlay and families have to be convinced it's worth it.

There's another reason why people are reluctant. Traditionally the house is for God and not for defecation. Overcoming this view is challenging but we've had huge take-up already.

We meet with Dahaur Ram. His wife has convinced him the family needs a latrine and he has a few concerns to discuss before making his final decision. He is worried that the latrine will smell so we go to a test rig I've made - simply three concrete latrine rings on top of each other with a slab fixed on top. I've made a small hole at the base of the first ring where I put in some paper and grass and light it. The smoke immediately billows inside but no smoke comes out of the top because the latrine slab has a water trap - a simple u-bend. I explain that because no smoke comes out then no smell would come out too. Dahaur's convinced.

But he's still concerned about the cost. We go over various options and talk about how he could either pay by instalments over six months or get a loan from the village water and sanitation committee.

Together we go off to Mohanpur village to meet the members of the committee.We've been working in Mohanpur for a few years and have had quite a significant impact. So far 270 homes have latrines and 80 do not.

At the village, I take Dahaur Ram to meet Malti Devi. She is our best advert and an avid promoter of sanitation. She has a very small home and couldn't install a latrine inside so wanted to have one at the front of the house. This caused a problem because her husband's friends and neighbours regularly played cards there. When they heard of her plans they were against the idea and said the stink would be terrible, the latrine would collapse in the soft sandy soil and asked why didn't the family use the fields as they've always done?

Groups of women meet at the centre and are encouraged to promote good hygiene and sanitation.

Credit: WaterAid / Ian Bray

But Malti Devi was determined. She went on one of our masonry courses and when her husband, a migrant worker, was away, she had the latrine installed. The men still play cards outside her house and there are never any smells coming from Malti Devi's latrine. If Dahaur Ram needed any further convincing he certainly got it from her!

At lunchtime I leave Dahaur Ram to talk to the village committee members and go to the local school to have a chat with the teacher and eat from my tiffin. After lunch I meet Manthes Kumar the hygiene promoter and we talk about plans to have an advert painted on the side of a house in a neighbouring village.

We then talk to the artist who will do the painting and go through the plans with him and some members of the village committee. Finally it's back to the workshop where Dahaur Ram tells me he has organised a loan with the village committee and we go through all the paper work with him.

My last stop is a meeting with my director Manoj Kr Verma, back in Patna. First though, I have to fight my way through the potholes, dust and traffic on the road back to the office."

Rajeev Rajan was interviewed by Ian Bray, WaterAid's Head of Communications.