Madurai: Madurai district has been declared as Open Defecation Free (ODF) on Thursday with all 420 village panchayats (1,946 habitations) having access to toilets and safe sanitation facilities.
About 97 percent of 3,44,592 rural household now have an individual toilets, while the remaining 3 percent having access to community toilet or shared toilet facilities ensuring safe disposal of human faeces. The District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) has so far facilitated construction of 1,45,371 individual toilets and 492 community toilets and row toilets where necessary.
Thanks to the sustained efforts made by additional collector Rohini Ramdas in the last two years organising various campaigns to bring behavioural change among the people, the district which ranked in the 31st position in the availability of sanitation facilities to public two years ago, has today achieved number one position.
Declaring ODF status in an event 'Kanagu Meyapadal' (Fulfilment of a dream) of ODF Madurai' organised by DRDA, the collector Veera Raghava Rao attributed the achievement to team work of officials belonging to various departments who worked in coordination with volunteers at village level. He urged the officials and volunteers to work in accordance with their conscience to sustain the ODF status for the welfare for the people.
Earlier, collector Rao inaugurated special equipment called 'ODF Barometer' to assess the sustainability of the ODF status in villages. The resolutions passed by all 420 village panchayats declaring themselves ODF was also submitted to him.
Ascribing the success to the people, Additional Collector Rohini Ramdas said, "When your dream becomes a shared one, people will take it forward. That is what happened in achieving ODF in Madurai,"When the DRDA took up this task, what we found it difficult was to change the age old habit of defecating in open space, she pointed out. "It is when we decided to conduct various awareness campaigns such as Nirmal Madurai, Sanitation melamine, ODF attendance board in schools, talking toilets and ODF monitoring involving people particularly women and children in the campaign which slowly turned into a people's movement," she said. In the last two years, DRDA has trained more than a lakh people as natural leaders in 420 villages to prevent open defecation in their respective villages. And 100 motivational trainers and nine master trainers had worked in the areas where people had shown reluctance to change their behaviour, she said.
Rohini also added that soon training would be organised for panchayat level workers on using ODF Barometer to sustain the ODF status and also to implement sold and liquid waste management. The master trainers K.Selvi from Sakkimangalam and Balan from Vepankulam from also shared their experience of working with the people.
