As shown in a recently held National seminar for toilets, 70 crores of Indian citizens defecate in open air!!!If we consider that a family of 4 needs a toilet, providing at least 01 % of that volume into reality, we should target making 1.750 crores toilets! By conventional means, using brick mortar technique, with manual masonry can we really achieve even that 01% of public being provided toilets? So, instead of focusing on methodology and man power which would not make us go anywhere close to our target, we considered –
- Teaching the villages the know how.
- Supply the materials.
- Train the underprivileged and dropouts to make their own living, build skill based employment generation.
- Thereby supplying the village with the most needy super structure and bottom assembled modular monolithic toilets.
Watsan as the name indicates, is a technocrat run Social Enterprise which already has proven its mettle by providing its electricity free water filters which lasts for more than 7 years without any huge maintenance costs to almost 1,00,000 households in the country, took up the Swach Bharat Mission 2 years ago in a different disruptive technology method.
As the director explains, “ We have been able to innovate making these toilets using waste fiber glass generated from the Wind mill blade manufacturers across the country, which otherwise dump the waste as land fill to the tune of 300 tonnes a month per Wind Mill Blade manufacturer! (7 big wind mill manufacturers are there in the country! We are ready to provide turnkey technology and training to any village approaching us, enabling them to do the toilets themselves, making one toilet a day! ”
What are the advantages of our modular toilet than that of the available ones?
- RCC or any other known toilets consume lots of time to construct.
- The other FRP toilets available in neither the market nor the Roto-molded cubicles made in HDPE address the problem of greenhouse effect, as they have single walled structure.
- Creates a hygiene atmosphere around the village which has mostly population defecating outside in open air.
- Creates Self-employment within the villages around the Wind Mill Manufacturer’s factory and imposes confidence in the mind that the Manufacturer has Corporate Social responsibility put in act and also saves huge land fill.
- The huge supply demand gap of 17.5 crores toilets we need immediately to make India free from open defecation is addressed, as the process and the design involves mostly rural employment and spread of product to themselves.
- The manufacturing set up to be set in a village does not need huge capital investment like Machinery, or need high energy requirements!
- The whole toilet gets cured in natural sun light and would be ready for installation! Complete Green energy process, and converting waste to beneficial product and the most needed product.
- The time for completion of one toilet is just 2 days as compared to the conventional toilet in RCC for at least 15 days.
- Cost effective than conventional RCC.
- Non –corrosive yet lighter in weight.
- Cannot be robbed and sold for the benefit of scrap selling, as FRP does not have scrap value.
- The design has minimal joints so that the structure looks neat, elegant and monolithic.
- A complete knock down (CKD) toilet which can also be built using the above village based nodal unit, can be removed and packed in a box to be transported to remote or far off places, hilly terrains and border security areas.
It was really difficult to convince the Government machinery and the stake holders to understand this total paradigm shift and disruptive technology, as they still stick on to conventional methods, by which they can never bridge the supply demand gap.
As technology driven company, we were also not comfortable in doing one or two toilets as the transportation costs itself would be bigger than the toilet’s cost. We were keen only on technology turnkey to villages and do it in volumes. When none took the idea right, the bold and beautiful students of Karma Yoga Village Forum, belonging to the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Manamai, near Mahabalipuram, Tamilnadu, took the idea into their hearts. When the author was conducting a class to these students on Social entrepreneurship, one of them asked, “Can we do one such toilet for a nearby slum?”
Enthusiasm gripping them, the complete toilet was built in a day’s time using the CKD method, and was installed in a house whose inhabitant has his wife and 3 girl children. As luck should have it and God’s helping hand, the day we took the toilet to the Institute, (for displaying it there for a week to attract CSR fund) and the day we installed it in the village, was not raining but all over the month there was copious rain!
The D-day came and the Director of the institute, Shri Shankaran and his Karma Yoga staff Prof. Arulsamy and his lieutenants lead the team for the inauguration of the toilet happily handed over to the smiling couple.
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