Priti Prakash
The orgy of rapes in rural India is not coming to an end anyways. Sadly rapes in Uttar Pradesh have ceased to shock us. The Durga, the Shakti, the Saraswati, or be it Lakshmi are finding themselves at the alter of lecherous, hungry, drooling men everywhere. Ask a 12 year old innocent girl of any village of India and that awed expression will tell the whole story of how scary the times have become. The gruesome rape and hanging by the mango tree of 2 early teenage girls did not yet blur from the memory when some 10 more incidents of rape and killing of poor girls was reported each successive day by the national media. It ranged from Uttar Pradesh being the hotbed to Madhya Pradesh. They have been generally 10, 11,12 to 15,16 year old hapless ones that are easy victms. To crown the glory the whole village and community in the shape of parents and guardians either disown the girl or try their best to hide the crime to the utter torture of the innocent soul who is unable to come to terms with what happened to her.
We wonder what has happened to the law and order of the state, or is it that the society no longer respects our women folk or some kind of inborn revenge feeling that takes this bad shape. In UP, case that comes out irrespective of all the after thoughts and the many stories that surface of the gruesome murder, the problem seeds from the fact that our rural population does not have an access to proper sanitation facility. In todays developed India we cannot imagine a house without not just one but a toilet attached to each room. It’s the basic necessity and an amenity that is essential to a decent living.
I remember when Prime Minister Modi was electioneering in Varanasi he emphasised the fact that cleanliness is very important and Varanasi people should undertake the responsibility of making and keeping their city clean with the help of the administration. This stemmed from the realization that Modi had from his visit to the holy city of Varanasi and the utterly bad state of Ganga and the bylanes of the age old civilization. He had earlier too mentioned that he would give priority to building toilets to temples. More so the then Congress Minister for environment Jairam Ramesh also had said the same kind of thing.
It is believed that the 2 girls in UP who were raped and hung to the mango tree were going out in the open at night to natures call and were found hanging the next morning. This is the ground reality in many a states of India not just UP. Lack of proper toilets for people. Jharkhand and Odisha are said to be the worst states where the problem of proper toilets is acute. Morning evening people have to go out in the open to defecate and that is when the women folk are most vulnerable. What is the state government doing since so many years. Haven’t the people voted them to power to at least provide them the essential services they are entitled to!
It’s a shame that after so much of progress in scientific field, advancement in living standards, space exploration, arms modernisation etc we cannot find the basic facility of a toilet in each and every home. Amoung this non performance I was surprised and happy both at the initiative of Tamil Nadu government that it is about to implement the idea of ‘She Toilets’ in the state. These toilets are also called e toilets. They will clean themselves up after every 5th use, with automatic on and off lights and sanitary napkin vending machine and incinerators. The toilets will come up as a relief to women who work outdoors all day as vendors, construction workers and police offciers. They will be set up at public places. It is a wonderful way to start with. The point that naturally comes to our mind then is that why cannot such initiatives be taken by other state governments as well. Hordes of public representatives go for unaccounted foreign trips in the name of study tours and come up with no reform structure that can fit in to improve the living of a common man. Because the insensitivity pervades deep within.
It is because of this mismanagement that our rivers are polluted drastically too. Ganga has huge tons of sewerage flowing in the river rendering it the dirtiest at Haridwar and Rishikesh. Paradoxically these two are our holy cities and a tourist hub of immense cultural values. Every other person that takes a dip for the belief of purifiying the body and soul is rather amidst some coli or human discharge or the remains of a dead corpse immersed in the cold waters. Sounds pathetic though.
The previous govt that ruled for 10 years and has just left office spent crores of rupees on high profile environmental project of cleaning Ganga but unfortunately the river stands where is was same number of years back. Lots of proposals for doing up Yamuna were mooted to the extend of giving a Thames like look to the river but again nothing happened.
Its amazing that rapes happen in our country because of lack of toilet facilities, misogynistic mindset, unjustified social and economic backwardness and quintessential feeling of one-upmanship. With all the promised development on one side and the paralysed development on the other, with the new government at the helm we want to see a change. Change in not the way the higher ups in the system and the haves exploit power and make more money but how the people in the villages specially women folk are secure and safe and being part of the same society have better living conditions that they deserve as human right. Basic education, health, roads, housing, sanitation, food, clean water, is it asking for too much?
