Water Works

India

New loos at two rural Indian primaries are having unexpected results in health education

Luke Harding in Seetanagaram reports

It is 11am, and the students of Marachipatti elementary school are queuing up in their courtyard. Girls and boys in two neat crocodiles stand outside the school's white-painted latrine block. They disappear inside. There is some vigorous hand washing. One by one they then emerge into the sunlight before filing back to the classroom, which is decorated with pictures of the Hindu elephant god Ganesh, Indira Gandhi, the Buddha and the saintly Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar.

This is, of course, the loo break. On the face of it there is nothing remarkable here - until you remember that this is rural India where there are few facilities of any kind, let alone toilets. The lack of proper sanitation is one of many obstacles Indian children face in their struggle for an education. Other factors include too few books, teachers who fail to turn up and the requirement for children to work - like their parents - in the fields.

Until recently, Marachipatti primary didn't have a latrine - nearly 85% of Indian schools are in the same dismal situation. Instead, the pupils would dash across the road and squat down in the thorn bushes. It could be a scary experience: "Sometimes snakes would come and disturb us. I would run away as quickly as possible", one 10-year-old girl, Vasanthi, explained. "This wasn't much fun."

The lack of sanitation brought other problems too. Pupils frequently suffered from diarrhoea. They also got hookworm. "In the past, as many as 10-15 children would be absent because of illness," the school's assistant head teacher Mr Krishnan recalls.

This lamentable situation ended three years ago when the British charity WaterAid came up with an ingenious solution: it built a sanitation block for the school's 104 pupils - at the cost of £260 - complete with two Indian-style latrines and a girls' and boys' urinal. More importantly, it asked the five- to 10-year-old pupils to manage the block themselves.

The students organised themselves into different committee responsible for keeping the loos clean, fetching water from the hand-pump outside and ensuring all pupils washed their hands with soap. Other students on the "tidy committee" looked after the school's modest grounds.

The charity also planted banana and papaya saplings next to the giant peepul tree in the school's shady courtyard. ("Most of the tree's figs are eaten by the crows," Krishnan explained.)

In addition, WaterAid paid for a health educator to visit the school, which is in the lush southern state of Tamil Nadu, some 65km north of the temple town of Tiruchchirappalli. The scheme was extended to some 40 other local government schools, covering 8,000 pupils.

And it worked. "I tell the students to cut their nails, make sure their clothes are clean and to brush their teeth and comb their hair," Vasanthi, a member of the personal hygiene committee, explains.

The initiative brought startling results: pupils became healthier and suffered from fewer illnesses. ("I haven't got hookworm any more," said Vinod, a 10-year-old latrine committee member.)

But, crucially, the pupils of Marachipatti primary took the message of hygiene awareness back into their homes. WaterAid's local health workers discovered it was far quicker, and more effective, to teach adults good hygiene practices via their children than to target them directly. "I told my mother and now she washes her hands with soap before cooking vegetables," Vasanthi pointed out.

The villagers of Marachipatti are poor. They live for the most part in mud houses thatched with coconut leaves, close to the lagoon-like Cauvery River. (Here, the river has almost dried up because of a venomous dispute between Tamil Nadu and the neighbouring state of Karnataka, which diverts much of its flow.) Nonetheless, several parents were encouraged to build their own latrines at the subsidised cost of Rs 850 (£12). With better sanitation, they found that they were spending less money on medicines. "I used to spend 1,000-2,000 rupees (£14-£28) a year on drugs," said Dhanam, a 30-year-old mother. "This figure has been considerably reduced. We don't get diarrhoea so much."

In the nearby government school of Udayakulamputhur, a short drive past fields of green rice and picturesque oblongs of red chillies drying on the road, the pupils make use of another new WaterAid-funded latrine block. This one is painted red. The students here have also become ambassadors of hygiene promotion - though in some cases their efforts have not always gone down well with an obdurate older generation.

"I've told my grandfather and grandmother what to do but they still don't wash their hands," Isabella, aged 10, lamented. "My parents do what I tell them. But there is a lot of fighting between my father and grandfather over hand-washing."

The school's head teacher, Mr Mali, detects a new pride among the students and parents. "Even if they have to spend some money, they are happily spending. If a kid loses his tie they will replace it," he says.

It will take a long time before every Indian school enjoys the facilities that the children of Udayakulamputhur and Marachipatti now use during their twice-a-day breaks. In many other rural areas of India the government education system has virtually collapsed. School buildings are falling apart, teachers are absent or do not exist and the dropout rates, especially among girls, are depressingly huge. And yet the success of the WaterAid scheme points the way forward to a better future in which there is not just education for some of the world's poorest children, but sanitation, too.