Water and Sanitation
Millennium Project’s Taskforce 7 on Water and Sanitation states ‘the international community is dangerously off track from its goal of halving the proportion of people lacking even basic sanitation services by 2015’ and India is no exception. ASHA-ODISHA takes some small but important steps to improve water supplies and sanitations facilities in schools and communities and to promote safe hygiene practices in our operational areas. The organization works with many partners including families, communities, government and like-minded organizations in this end.
Sustainable Community Development is a perspective emphasizing a bottom-up people-centred approach to poverty eradication, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental protection where we worked with ACC to “help the people to help themselves” towards achieving self-reliance. We ASHA believe in the fullest development of their physical, social, economic and intellectual conditions that every person has ability to demand his/her right in order to facilitate a process which certainly bridged the gap between the service provider and client communities. Water is one of the most essential needs of human life. Consumption of unsafe drinking water, improper environmental sanitation is the root cause of many diseases. To save people from this we have taken many initiatives. Construction of IHHL is one of them.
Construction of Individual House Hold Latrine (IHHL)
The graph depicts that more than 60% of targeted IHHL have been constructed. The rest is expected to be completed within a couple of month’s time. Our next course of action will be to get more and more IHHL constructed from the Govt of India’s flagship programme Total Sanitation Programme. Moreover, emphasis will be given on usage of these toilets so that real benefits can be acquired.
Some other steps towards improving sanitation status of the project area are presented in tables.
| Repair of Tube well Platform | Construction of Soak Pit | |||||||
| Name of the Village | Tubewell Platform repaired | Person Benefited | Name of the Village | Soak Pit Formed | Person Benefited | |||
| Bargaon | 10 | 1845 | Katapali | 1 | 150 | |||
| Katapali | 3 | 450 | Bargaon | 1 | 72 | |||
| Khaliapali | 6 | 1254 | Khaliapali | 1 | 100 | |||
| Dang | 6 | 1197 | Total | 3 | 322 | |||
| Piplipali | 3 | 475 | ||||||
| Bardol | 7 | 1325 | Pond Cleaning | |||||
| Total | 35 | 6546 | Name of the Village | No. of Pond Cleaned | Person Benefited | |||
| Dang | 2 | 400 | ||||||
| Construction of Bathing Ghat | Bargaon | 1 | 232 | |||||
| Name of the Village | No. of Bathing Ghat | House Hold Benefited | Piplipali | 2 | 1350 | |||
| Dang | 1 | 300 | Total | 5 | 1982 | |||
These interventions seemed to be scarce but certainly strong foundations upon which effective infrastructures as well as motivation could be built. We not only took up these works as any activities but provided due importance to the process of disseminating the idea and practices on sanitation. Success on Sanitation could be achieved through individual orientation and building a sense of urgency among the community. ASHA-Odisha team with the assistance of ACC Cement, Bargarh did exactly the same. We reached out to the people, motivated them and gradually but surely improved the overall sanitation in and around the project area.