Keshav had warned me that the toilet facilities in Kushinagar would be primitive. I just did not realize how primitive.
We stayed in a village called Dumiri in Kushinagar. The house belonged to one of the RTI fellows working with Keshav in Deoria/Kushinagar. It was a pucca house in the sense it was built of bricks. But toilets, I realized, there were none. The toilet facility, it dawned on me, were that primitive.
On the way from Kushinagar to Dumiri, dusk had fallen. As we wended our way to the village, I could see clusters of women moving along the road. I was surprised till I hit the obvious solution. The women can go to toilet only under the cover of night or early in the morning before anyone wakes up.
There is a realization dawning. Everywhere there are now signboards urging people to build toilets at their homes. The selling point is that by having toilets at home, they would not have to send their daughters/ daughters-in-law far from home for this basic necessity. The bonus point would be that it would keep the diseases away. There were also notices urging daughters to refuse marriage into those houses where there were no toilets.
Despite all this there was very little evidence of a toilet in the villages. The only village where I saw toilet in every house was in a village called Sohana in Ghazipur district. The toilets that are being built are the most primitive type but still a toilet.
Will this improve hygiene? I do not know.
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