Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan

"When I tried to convince the villagers about toilets, sometimes they would scoff and scorn at me for being ‘jobless’. Often men would misbehave and taunt as well."

“We do not just build toilets. We teach the women to build and maintain their own toilets. So that, after they master these construction skills, they can earn a living from it by building toilets for others." #WorldToiletDay #Sanitation #ImpactThatMatters

Over 16,000 community soak pits built. Houses in all 263 villages have individual toilets. Over 1 lakh trees planted across 400 acres. And the entire district is open-drainage free, which means no open sewerage anywhere! #ImpactThatMatters #IAS #Governance

Guwahati-based environmental scientist, Dr Amarjyoti Kashyap, has created a pond on the rooftop of his two-storey building on LNB Road at Hatigaon. He has been rearing and cultivating fish for the last one month.

For the last two years, Dr Chittaranjan Jena and his team have been visiting interior villages of Odisha to provide healthcare support.

When the men in the villages showed no interest, 22 women joined hands to encourage families in their district to fund the construction of toilets themselves by providing the means.

The decision was announced at an event titled, "Indian Transport Sector: Marching towards sustainable mobility" at Conference of Parties (COP-23), Indian Pavilion at Bonn, Germany on Tuesday.

These young innovators created over 45 robots and swept an area of 750 square feet clean, putting all of them to use in less than 15 minutes.

Collaborating with Manakosam Manam Trust (MMT), the Swachh Challapalli campaign visualised complete eradication of practices like open defecation and dumping of garbage in open spots.

Open defecation continues to be a major problem in India. Governments and other agencies are constructing toilets in huge numbers to combat this issue, but overlooking certain basic issues which may make adoption very slow. Balaji Gopalan looks at one such key issue – toilet design.