Sanitation

From starting a Rural Sanitary Mart for villagers for buying toilet construction material on credit, to setting up vigilante committees for catching people defecating in the open, Rampur Panchayat left no stone unturned to become 100% open defecation free in just 4 months. All thanks to the pro-active 60-year-old mukhiya of the village, Nirmala Devi, and her incredible use of the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach.

Finding a public toilet, leave alone a clean one, can often prove to be a challenge in India. But this brilliant app helps you find one and also allows you to add new ones that you discover to the database, so others can be helped too.

Shyamsunder Bedekar from Gujarat has come up with a brilliant innovation which has the potential to change many lives in rural India. A low cost sanitary napkin incinerator, which he calls the Ashudhdhinashak, will help numerous women in discarding sanitary napkins in an environment-friendly way. This is how it came into existence.

Five panchayats in Gajapati district of Odisha overcame all hurdles to finally get declared Open Defecation Free (ODF). Now, the aim is to make all 119 panchayats in the district ODF by 2016. Read how the administrators, volunteers and villagers themselves are coming together to make this happen.

Menstruation is still considered a taboo in many parts of the country. While many still do not prefer to talk about this "problem", girls in UP are coming forward to not only talk about it but also to spread awareness about low cost sanitary napkins.

Gagan Nandi, a 24 year old, kickstarted a cleanliness drive which has turned Basavanagudi from a garbage dump to an area with neat and clean corners. Know more about this amazing cleanliness drive.

Temsutula Imsong and Darshika Shah took matters into their own hands and cleaned some of the filthiest ghats in Varanasi on their own, with help from social media. Here's how they even caught the attention of the PM.

Newly-wed young Priyanka Bharti brought about a social revolution by standing up to her husband’s family when they asked her to defecate in the open. And with this, she started a movement to ensure proper sanitation facilities for women in her village and nearby villages.

Half the funds will be released before the construction begins and the other half only after seeing photographs of under-construction toilets as proof. Know more about the scheme and how the government plans to eliminate open defecation by 2019.

While urban India is talking about the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, rural India is actually seeing it taking place on the ground. What's more - it is students who are leading the movement from the front! The photos below show you one of the biggest sanitation and cleanliness mass awareness programs ever conducted by any government in the world.