Thanks to support from the ACT Foundation, the people of Kumudimmolai now have 90 more ecosan, clean water and livelihoods.

Tamil Nadu in the south of India is considered to be one of the wealthiest states in the country, but behind the statistics of economic growth and development lies another story – one of acute poverty. The rural population of Tamil Nadu ranks among the poorest in the world, with an estimated 12 million people living on or below the poverty line.

Kumudimoolai is a rural village in Tamil Nadu, 30 miles south of the bustling city of Cuddalore. The 1,973 people living here belong to one the poorest and most excluded social groups in India, and when we first visited the community, poverty was rife. There were no working toilets in the village, which meant people were forced to find somewhere to go out in the open, which was spreading illness and disease. On top of this, the area is prone to flooding, and is always water logged. Human waste and in-organic fertilisers had contaminated the ground and water supply, making it hazardous to drink. Maintaining work was also a struggle for many people; in rural areas such as this many people are dependent on seasonal agricultural work, which leaves them without any employment for 3-4 months of every year. This makes it impossible for them to become financially stable.

Kumudimoolai village

Kumudimoolai school ecosan

We were introduced to Kumudimoolai through the resourcefulness of the children living there. Over the past several years, we have been working in the area, building ecosan (composting) toilets in several of the schools. The children loved the ecosan so much, that they took home stories of how big a difference a toilet can make. Before we knew it, we were getting requests from families all over the village to help them build ecosan in their own homes, and when the ACT Foundation chose to fund a project there, we were able to honour those requests.

After supporting a successful project in the nearby village of Villupalayam, the ACT Foundation were enthusiastic to support ecosan projects elsewhere. By the end of 2012, Kumudimoolai had 90 more ecosan toilets, free and clean water for the whole village, and extra employment.

One of the ecosan toilets

The water tower can store 60,000 litres

Our ecosan toilets have proved to be perfect for the flood-prone village, as the ‘waste’ is stored above ground and tightly sealed, so even in a flood there is no pollution. Initial surveys are incredibly positive, with an almost 92% usage rate of the toilets. On a recent site visit, Jane Bond (Volunteer Project Officer in India) reported that the biggest reaction she received from people, especially women, was how much easier and better life is now with a toilet; their lives are safer, healthier and cleaner.

Because the water in the area was so salty and contaminated by fertiliser chemicals, we had to seek a good quality water source from outside the village. With permission, a borehole was drilled in the next neighbourhood, allowing water to be pumped into the village and stored in a new water tower. The water tower stores a staggering 60,000 litres, which means that there is always a ready supply of fresh, clean water for everyone in the village.

Enjoying clean drinking water

Collecting water from the new water tap

The final part of the project has helped bring a year-round income to the 70 families who struggled with seasonal work, by providing them with either cows or goats for milking. One lady in the village – Selvi Mani – got a goat. She is now able to get a profit every day by selling the milk, and is planning to sell the dung as compost during the next agricultural season.

Thanks to the ACT Foundation, the lives of the people of Kumudimoolai have been transformed. With proper sanitation, clean water and sustainable livelihoods, the community will be healthier and safer, and able to work their way out of poverty.

After visiting the project, Renu Ghale, Grants Manager for the ACT Foundation, commented that:
“The ecosan toilets are a great revelation and the composting and fertiliser processes have had an amazing impact on the Kumudimoolai community, who are able to gain livelihoods and become model farmers for other villages.”

We look forward to updating you in the future of the real and lasting difference the project will make to the village.

Renu Ghale from the ACT Foundation visits Kumudimoolai

I spend a day with one of our field staff, Arumugam to help me better understand our project work and life in rural Tamil Nadu. He takes me to some villages we are planning on working in as soon as we have funds.

I know the facts – 7 million+ rural households here in Tamil Nadu don’t have access to toilets – 76% of the rural population. Water quality is worsening, largely due to human fecal waste in drinking water; 91% of water tested in one study was contaminated. Over the last five years incidences of acute diarrheal diseases have increased from about 116,000/year to 523,000/year. Today I’m going to be meeting just a few of the people who live with these conditions on a daily basis.

 
We go to a village called Boothampedi; the road doesn’t reach the village so we walk along a small dyke; on either side goats and young cows are gazing in recently harvested paddy fields. It’s very hot and it’s quiet in the midday heat. The houses are small and made from mud with thatch roofs, small mud stoves are outside and piles of sticks/dried cow dung for fuel.

Arumugam shows me a banana tree and we walk down a small path, stopping to admire a veg patch; he points out chillies, aubergines and potatoes. We are looking at a water pump when a young woman comes up the path to talk to us. Her name is Illakiya and she is 21, while we talk it becomes clear she is bright, curious and interested. The vegetable garden we have just admired is hers.

I am a significant object of interest, I might be the first white woman she has ever seen. She’s so vibrant I take the opportunity to ask her questions I don’t usually ask and Arumugam translates as fast as he can. He tells me she can understand some English – she is replying to some of what I’m saying in Tamil before he’s translated.

Illakiya says she left school when she was about 14, though there doesn’t seem to be a definite reason. Now she is a tailor and sometimes earns up to 50 rupees a day. I ask if she’s married which makes her laugh and she says no, but she might get married in a few years. I ask if she is ever ill and she tells me she often has headaches, a cough and a fever. When I ask, she doesn’t know why she is ill.

I’m interested by her illness as I know respiratory problems are increasingly being linked to contaminated water and that headaches can be a side effect of having to wait until nightfall to go to the toilet. This means that women have to get up very early or they have to go at night. I ask her what she thinks about open air defecation and she tells Arumugam that she only defecates in the open once every 2 days, it’s inconvenient and she’d like a toilet.

I look around the village and think about the practicalities of what she is saying. It means walking around in the dark, probably without shoes – I might cut myself which could mean tetanus, my clothes might get torn or dirty and I have to wash them by hand, I’d be bitten by mosquitos maybe catching malaria or dengue. I’d need to be quiet so no one knew what I was doing – I might get bitten by a snake like a young man in a village we visited that morning. Considering all this I’m not surprised she doesn’t defecate more than once every 2 days. I’m humbled by the reality of her life in comparison to mine.

Jane Bond is volunteer Project Officer for Wherever the Need India. She has been living and volunteering in India since November 2011, based in Tamil Nadu since February 2013.

One of the fundamental benefits of Wherever the Needs approach to Sanitation and water is our compost toilets which mean that human waste is safely and effectively recycled. Human waste is very hazardous to health and can easily enter the water system if not properly managed.

Here in India only 30% of the country has a sewage system and much of that is leaking or incomplete, common opinion being that around 20% of the system is approaching effective; mostly waste is dumped into water systems or into pits which often leak, leaching waste through the soil. Each person’s faecal waste is about 127kg/per year; every gram contains: 10 million pathogens, 1 million protozoa, 100,000 helminths (intestinal worms) and 10,000 worms and viruses.
It makes my stomach turn and I feel pretty nauseous when I think of India’s 1.2 billion people and the incredibly huge amount of human waste they generate annually, most of it slowly creeping into the water system.

So, David (Wherever the Need CEO) and Paramasivan (head of our Indian office) take me to see our central compost facility. I’m excited and interested to see this but also slightly nervous as I don’t know what to expect. I have experience of composting from allotments and gardens in the UK but this is a bit different to veggie peelings and greenery!

The centre is outside Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu and we are in a very rural area. I see figures which look a bit like scarecrows in fields and outside some houses; to scare off demons and bad luck. Crowds of people are walking along the side of the road coming back from the fields, more people than I have every before seen in one place in rural India.

We get to the centre and I’m shown the crates of compost which have been collected. They are piled high and the place is pretty full filled. It’s a hot and humid day but there is no smell at all – it looks like very high quality compost to me, I would definitely use it. Human faecal matter composts down by about half – 127kg changes to 70kgs. I researched this one day and size varies significantly according to diet – India is second on the global size list and I was amused to discover that New Yorkers have the smallest! No wonder Woody Allen is always complaining…

The process and design of our ecosan is explained to me in more detail – how the urine and faecal waste are separated to prevent smells from occurring, how the pathogens and other bacterium are killed off in different ways as part of the compost process and the necessity of the addition of ash, sawdust, sand, organic materials as a bulking/drying agent. We recently started using a special bacteria which has made a significant different to compost time – the speed is so incredible it’s hard to believe! We talk about the urine and dilution and filtering requirements it has. The heat here seems to speed up the effect of composting compared to the UK. If only I had some pot plants I could test it out on – but India doesn’t do them!

Jane Bond is volunteer Project Officer for Wherever the Need India. She has been living and volunteering in India since November 2011, based in Tamil Nadu since February 2013.

I’m adjusting to rural India and as we travel out to look at projects I am fascinated. Main roads are filled with cows, buses, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians sharing the same space – pavements don’t exist and traffic lights are often ignored. The river of humanity is chaotic and noisy, everyone honks musical horns, fails to use indicators and drives where they like. Only cows placidly move along, serene in the knowledge they are the rulers of the road!

Roads become smaller, emptier and windier deeper into the rural areas. Its harvest time, paddy fields are being hand scythed by groups of people, haystacks are common, we slow down for herds of bullocks and goats walking along the roads and grain are being spread across the road. This is for threshing rice; as vehicles drive over the rice the outer husk is separated from the grain. I think this is an ingenious labour saving solution.

We stop to see the rice grown on Wherever the Need’s research plot (testing the effectiveness of organic composts and fertilisers). Unfortunately just after the seedlings were planted a cyclone hit, destroying them. Afterwards rice seed were scattered in the plot as the compost had already been laid; we didn’t expect much to grow. David and I are completely amazed by the huge pile of rice sacks in front of us neither of us can quite believe it. The yield is 40% higher than a plot that size would usually generate with industrial fertilizers. The reason for the increase is the repeated use of our compost which has increased soil quality and yield over time.

A huge sack of rice is unstitched and for the first time I see a grain of rice still in its husk – its surprisingly tough. I’m taught how to rub your hands together to release the grain from the husk – magic. Unsurprisingly I’m not very good at it and I’d go hungry if I had to do that every day. The husks keep the grains safe – if the husk gets wet the grains inside will still be edible, it can withstand a soaking, dry out and still be edible. The husks keep pests and insects away will keep the rice for very long periods of time.

Each sack is over 50 kilos but wouldn’t feed a below poverty line family for more than 2-3 months – it would keep me going for years. Rice is India’s staple and a key component of nearly every meal poor people here eat –as a grain or ground up into flour. It’s hard to imagine for westerners – just like supermarkets are hard to imagine for people here.

As I stand and look at the pile of rice it sinks in how significant harvests are to subsistence farmers fortunes; many can’t afford to buy fertilizers. Affordable organic compost which generates a higher yield would really changes lives.

Jane Bond is volunteer Project Officer for Wherever the Need India. She has been living and volunteering in India since November 2011, based in Tamil Nadu since February 2013.

Read her stories from the field…

 
Yesterday it rained heavily and unexpectedly in Tamil Nadu. For some areas it was the first rain in over a year, so I’m going to talk about the realities of living with India’s water supply.

You’d think the rain would be a good thing, but it came at the wrong time and many farmers had seedlings damaged. Water here is a health risk we are lucky enough not to be familiar with in the west.

When I first came to live in India water became a mild obsession as I adjusted – every drop I needed had to be pumped and was available only at certain times. For cooking and drinking my water had to be filtered and sometimes boiled – all of this took a lot of planning and time. At the time I lived in Calcutta which has terrible sanitation and water issues. Despite my care I was sick with water related illness regularly – sometimes as often as once a month. I haven’t lived in Tamil Nadu for long but I have no doubt that the water problems here are as dangerous and common as I am used to elsewhere.

Friends in different parts of the city would turn their taps on and have dirty, stinking brown water appear, newspapers had stories about residents buying bottled water to wash their children in. My Indian neighbour’s babies and toddlers were hospitalized with acute diarrhea and dehydration, and I would be asked to pray to “my god” for help. Water related intestinal disease is the most common killer of children under 5 – a child dies every 17 seconds from sanitation related diseases.

Consider that human beings are over 80% water; the implications of contaminated water can be easily seen to have significant health effects. Proper sanitation is vital to improving health – over 90% of water supplies tested in Tamil Nadu contain fecal matter. Compost toilets are a simple, effective and long term way to provide sanitation without polluting drinking water.

One village we are waiting for funding for has water which looks like it has high iron content – hand pumps coloured red and buckets of orangey red water. It’s possible this is actually a dangerous bacteria which arises through certain alluvial soil conditions – it has all the indications of iron in the water but is difficult to test for and dangerous to health. It takes the local villagers at least 3 hours to filter the water cloths to improve the quality. Despite this it’s probably still unsafe to drink and has long term health effects but they have no option, it’s their only supply.

When I visited, the women told me that lack of toilets was a problem as they struggled to find somewhere – the village is surrounded by paddy fields. During growing season they can’t use the fields as it causes problems, instead they use streams and roadsides. A few months ago someone was bitten by a snake while out defecating which meant high medical bills. Thankfully the young man survived. The village really needs ecosan toilets and water filtration/iron removal systems.

No matter who you are, living in India means contaminated water is a constant and ever present risk; simple things like having cup of tea or cleaning your teeth involve significantly more effort and awareness here.

You may have heard on the news about the cyclone that recently devastated south-east India. Tamil Nadu, the region in which many of Wherever the Need’s projects are based, has been badly hit – the cyclone has devastated the lives of the people and communities with whom we work so closely.

Infrastructure, services and facilities are severely impaired and damaged; towns and villages are without electricity and clean water; many people have been left homeless.

Water supplies are polluted and there is a genuine concern that there will be an outbreak of diseases such as diarrhoea or cholera

We want to use our expertise and knowledge of the region to get sanitation and water facilities to where they are most needed and we need your help.

Please donate now.

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$40

will pay for a water filter which will enable people on the ground to access clean, safe water

$800

will buy a mobile eco-sanitation unit, by-passing the need for infrastructure to provide much-needed toilet facilities

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Thanks to your generosity we have raised over £10,000 for this cause!

The extra £2,700 raised beyond our target will be used to provide school equipment and books for the children, which will greatly enhance their education and future prospects. We are currently discussing with an organisation in India the possibility of them matching all the money we have raised; this would improve the childrens’ lives more than we had hoped for.

Watch this space for updates in the coming months…

To find out more about our Christmas Appeal, visit this page: www.wherevertheneed.org.uk/donate/christmas-appeal-2010

“It is estimated that only 10 percent of the three million tonnes of phosphorus excreted by the global human population each year are returned to agricultural soils,” Britain’s largest organic certification body, the Soil Association, said.

An adequate supply of phosphorous is essential for seed formation, root development and maturing of crops.

The supply of phosphorus from mined phosphate rock could peak as soon as 2033 after which it will become increasingly scarce and expensive, the report said.

“We are completely unprepared to deal with the shortage of phosphorus inputs, the drop in production and the hike in food prices that will follow,” the Soil Association said.

Historically in Europe, phosphorus was returned to agricultural land through the application of animal manure and human excreta but from the mid nineteenth century it was replaced by phosphate mined in distant places.

Heavy Metals

The report called for a change in European Union regulations to permit the use of treated sewage sludge, known as biosolids, on organic certified land, subject to appropriate restrictions on issues such as concentrations of heavy metals.

EU regulations prohibit the use of biosolids on organic land due to concerns about the toxic effects of heavy metals cause by combining human excreta with other waste products such as industrial effluent.

“Heavy metal levels have declined in recent years and are now low enough for the organic movement to re-consider allowing treated sewage sludge to be used where it meets strict standards,” the report said.

The report also called for a reduction of the amount of meat in human diets to reduce demand for mined phosphorus.

“This is because the efficiency with which phosphorus inputs are converted into dietary phosphorus is much higher in vegetable-based products than livestock products,” it said.”

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt)

source: http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-53218220101129