Heard of the CLTS magic?

The other day I was at a small tribal village with about 30 households in the interiors of Jharkhand State. We were being shown an approach called the Community-Led Total Sanitation approach, CLTS for short. Pioneered by Kamal Kar, this approach is radical in that it believes that at the heart of the practice of good sanitation lies not technology or finance but the community. By ‘triggering’ a community’s awareness of the impact of bad sanitation it induces behaviour change within.

The process of awareness building is through a series of steps which includes the impact of open defecation, the pooling of water and the consequent breeding of malaria-causing mosquitoes, the dirt present on the hands if you don’t wash it and so on. Once the community is aware it finds its own solution to the problem. What was striking was the complete knowledge the people had developed on the impact of bad water and sanitation in their village. Each household had built a rudimentary ‘no cost’ toilet on its own. A simple hole-in-the-ground with a cover protected for privacy with bamboo sticks and cloth. These were built from locally available materials.

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