Recently Wherever The Need had the opportunity to visit Madhuranthaganallur, forty kilometres south of Tamil Nadu in the State of Tamil Nadu, India.

This is a large village with over 2,000 inhabitants living in over four hundred houses and our brief was to help find a new water source post Tsunami for clean drinking water and install new toilets for those houses where they were not already available.

To date thirteen shallow hand pumps, five deep well hand pumps, twenty one street taps and three over head tanks have been installed, together with one hundred and eighty eight toilets.

To complete the project there are a further eighty one toilets needed for the general population, as well as twenty bio-gas toilets and two toilets for the school. In order to participate in the scheme householders have to make a contribution to the overall cost of the facilities and micro-credit facilities have been arranged through a local bank. At the current exchange rate this contribution works out to £66 per toilet, a very large sum indeed to the families in the village but it ensures that people feel they actually have ownership of the toilets and treat them with more respect than if they were just given them.

An education and training programme for the different facilities has been/is taking place and the bio-gas toilets (where methane is collected in a tank and used for cooking) is arousing great interest from everyone in the village.

WTN was treated very well on our visit and we had a huge ceremony to mark the completion of what they are calling phase one, although I am not sure where the dividing line between one and two actually is - probably our visit!

There are large paintings around the village explaining what is going on and how to use the facilities and why there are beneficial to people’s health and well-being.

These paintings are quite graphic, but need to be as many of the older villagers are illiterate and it is through the images that they understand what is happening and how to make best use of the new toilets and how not to waste water. We had an interesting example of how not to do this when we passed some new toilets in a village installed by a well-meaning NGO without consultation with the local villagers. The toilets stand unused, and people continue to use the local fields, risking illness and animal attack.

We were shown a number of toilets and a hand pump being installed by a hard-working team of female labourers, resplendent in their WTN T-shirts and hats.

They also make their own concrete blocks, which now provide additional income as they sell the excess to other builders.

The women generally do this work as the men are either fishing or involved in alternative work. To put it all into perspective, the women earn 100 rupees per day, which is about £1.40. The bulk of the project is complete, the toilet installation is ongoing and the final biogas toilets are planned for delivery in late September/early October. We are really pleased with how this project is progressing and it is extremely gratifying to see so much interaction going on between our local organisation and the villagers.

If you feel you can help the village please let us know or donate