Apart from children being prone to water-borne diseases, their attendance in schools is also affected. Due to the repeated episodes of water-borne diseases related illnesses, students drop out of school, further affecting their education and economic prospects.

Safe drinking water and adequate sanitation are especially crucial for girls to take their rightful place in the classroom and avoid absenteeism. Without these basic necessities, girls will continue to remain absent. While affecting all school-aged children, inadequate sanitation facilities hit the girls hardest, pushing many out of the classroom for lack of privacy and dignity, leading to reduced earning power and poverty for most of them in the long run.

Given the substantially positive impact of safe drinking water on the establishment of good health, hygiene, sanitation practices and education during formative stage of a child’s life, addressing the widespread problem of microbial contamination in drinking water and providing sanitation facilities as a priority can have far-reaching effects in reducing water-borne diseases, decrease in drop-outs from schools especially of girls, reducing child morbidity and mortality.

Keeping the above issue in mind, TARA (Technology and Advancement for Rural Action), the social enterprise wing of the Development Alternatives (DA) Group and CLEAN-India programme (Community Led Environment Action Network), a youth centre-centric and community led environment assessment, awareness, action and advocacy programme, have developed a WATSAN (water and sanitation) programme to reach out to schools and communities for access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities.

TARA has received a Corporate Social Responsibility grant from Ford Motors and Jochnick Foundation for addressing safe drinking water and sanitation needs of schools and communities in more than 100 schools across India.

Through these projects, more than 100,000 children in schools will be provided with access to safe drinking water through installation of water filters such as the Jal-TARA bio-sand filter and other such sustainable water purification systems. Around 30,000 girl students will also benefit with safe sanitation practices as a result of installation of toilets.

School children and community members are being and will continue to be engaged in awareness generation on the importance of safe drinking water and hygiene through formation of eco-committees. These projects build on the experience of the nation-wide Community Led Environment Action Network (CLEAN) programme where student initiated community assessment, awareness, advocacy and action are carried out.

Primary Target Group: Primary beneficiaries are the school children. More than 100,000 school children will gain access to safe drinking water. The girl students in the schools (approximately 30,000) will also be able to use safe and hygienic toilets. Over 1000 CLEAN-India student ambassadors are being developed to reach out to communities for safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene practices

Secondary Target Group: Secondary beneficiaries are the local communities near the schools. Through student-led awareness campaigns, these communities will learn easy and cost-effective ways to conserve and purify water as well as understand the benefits of safe water sanitation and hygiene.

The initiatives over the next couple of years are intended to result in far-reaching outcomes as listed below:

We look forward to reaching out to more and more children and communities. Provide them with the basic amenities of life – safe water and sanitation!  q