"More toilets can settle the
affair"
The vehement uproar and anxiousness
over the mandate 2014 is finally got over. The rise of Bharathiya Janatha Party
lead by Narendra Modi was incremental and the erstwhile congress party encountered
the biggest rout in its decade’s long history. Ever since the election
commission announced the election schedule media channels and newspapers hardly
got a subject other than the mudslinging of political parties, rhetoric
speeches and umpteen scams. NAMO and RG constantly appeared in news with their controversial
remarks and counter attacks and occupied more than 80 % of new papers and a major
share of broadcasting hours. Of course it’s news when a nation with 1.27
billion population heading towards the polling booths for a major election which
in fact will decide their future for next five years. But there is much other
news which completely kept away from media attention in this pandemonium.
I have
come across with the story of Alakh Niranjan, a paper hawker from Bihar which
appeared in the closing page of the The Hindu News paper dated on 15th May with
a quirky headline. He came into the news as his wife appeared in a sessions
court asking for divorce since he
failed to satisfy one of her basic needs for sanitation , ‘a toilet’. He
used to force her for open defecation at every morning eventually compelled her
to sacrifice her marriage. But their story end up in a happy note as Sulabh
International, an NGO set foot in their life at the eleventh hour and built a
toilet to solve the issue.
Reading this news I couldn’t alleviate the
seriousness of that topic in such a way as it has been treated. Putting it in a
broader point, imagine If every woman in rural India come up for a cause Inspired
by the alakh’s wife, the story would have been different. In India open
defecation and concerning diseases are a major challenge which no ruling
government tried to tackle effectively. I feel pity of the way former central
ministers Jayaram Ramesh and P Chidambaram had been treated for making attempt
to bring this issue towards the public attention. Former union rural
development minister Jayaram Ramesh’s remarks on the issue that “ our country
needs more toiltes than temples” created a huge political row. His emphasis on
the need to give priority to toilets and cleanliness than building temples had
been misrepresented.
Four months ago, while I was travelling to
Delhi by train as part of my training, my pursuit to capture the picturesque
landscape and beautiful meadows early in the morning had been shattered by the
people who turned back to fulfill their daily routine without even covering
their private parts. Having lived in a metropolitan city like Chennai more than
four years and being a frequent train traveler it would not have been a strange
thing but the number really astonished me. It is in this circumstances I considered
Alakh Niranjan’s wife and their story should have got much more attention. Of course
“we need more toilets than temples”.
