173 toilets in 24 days: Khanapur's Prema Timmanagoudar makes 100% sanitation her mission

Most people retire at 60. But Prema Timmanagoudar has taken on added responsibility with the jaunty enthusiasm of a 16-year-old. In July, when she was elected the chairperson of the gram panchayat for three villages in Karnataka (Khanapur, Radder Nagnur and Gangapur), Timmanagoudar had chalked out her task for the first month in the job — toilets in every home in Khanapur village.

"Lack of toilets is a big problem... I'd been wanting to set this right much before I even contested the elections," she says. Just 20 of the 200-odd households in Khanapur, a village of about 1,500 people, nearly half of whom are women, had toilets when Timmanagoudar took charge. "Khanapur is a small village, yet we faced a lot of difficulties in convincing people about building toilets," recalls Timmanagoudar.

The Centre offers a subsidy of Rs12,000 per toilet under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan, but this money is given to a household only after the toilet's construction. To get the work started, Timmanagoudar had to convince all the villagers to pool in resources and make an advance payment to the contractor to commence construction. The villagers raised nearly Rs4 lakh. Raising funds, however, was a smaller hurdle.

"The peculiarity is that all the village houses are connected... all the houses share a wall with another adjacent house," offers Timmanagoudar's daughter Kirti. "So when toilets had to be built, it was inevitable that a part of area that the toilet would occupy would belong to the adjacent house owners."

The thought of having a toilet directly in front of their homes was an unsavoury one for Khanapur villagers. For a lot of residents — accustomed to defecating in the open — the notion that someone would be doing the job just across their private space and the resultant odour, made them resist the plan. "Changing their mindset was a bigger challenge," says Timmanagoudar. "I had to convince one particular family that the government also gives free plants, which would act as a buffer, and that a new wall would be built to partition the toilet from their house area."

Not only did this grandmother of four ensure least resistance to get the toilets constructed, she also made the beneficiaries equal partners in the construction process. About 30-50 youngsters worked alongside the construction workers. "For every one labourer, we deputed three villagers to speed up the work. For example, it would have taken 2-3 hours to unload and carry all the construction material to the site. Thanks to the village youth, the time was reduced to 45 minutes," quips the woman, herself an agriculturalist. Likewise, she devised an efficient work plan for all the construction activities — ensuring that none of the rented equipment, such as excavating machines, etc, were ever unused. She also roped in the village women to cook meals for the construction workers — so that even the time they would've otherwise spent on cooking could be spent on building toilets. Towards the end, she and the villagers were working 15 hours daily to meet the deadline.

"In about 24 working days, we built 173 toilets," says Timmanagoudar. "People of different castes came together to build the toilets. It is beautiful to see people of all ages and groups unite for a common goal."

Khanapur will celebrate this feat of sanitation and "equality" at an event to be presided over by state minister for rural development and panchayat raj, HK Patil, on August 15. And next on Timmanagoudar's task list is to ensure 100 per cent toilet households in her other two villages, Radder Nagnur and Gangapur, by October 2 2015.

Khanapur's residents realised that Timmanagoudar's relentless effort to ensure toilets in all the village homes kept her away from harvesting her lentil (moong dal) crop. So about 30 residents, mostly women, have come forward to work a full day (with pay) in her field to complete the harvesting.