How imagination, cooperation and grant-matching delivered clean water to the poorest of India’s poor
By Peter
McKenzie-Brown
Anil Jain calls it the “WASH” project, with the
acronym standing for “water and sanitation hygiene.” Whatever you call it, this
initiative illustrates the power Rotarians can harness when clubs work
together.
Anil is president of The Rotary Club of Calgary
Centennial, which provided leadership for WASH, which now has participation
from three other Alberta clubs – Calgary, Calgary Heritage Park, and the Rotary
Club of Olds – and also the Rotary Club of Phoenix, Arizona. Those clubs and
Alberta’s Community Initiatives Program are donating about $47,500 to the WASH
project, but that is just the beginning. Even though the Canadian dollar has
recently declined in value, in the Rotary way of doing things donations on both
sides of the border are deemed to be contributions in US funds.
Now comes the magic of matching grants. Beginning in
the upcoming Rotary year, our District can provide enhanced District
Development Grants. In this case, they will amount to $70,000. The Rotary
Foundation will match those funds according to one formula, and then use
another to provide further matching grant. The grand total? $177,500. Using his
favourite word, Jain describes this outcome as “wonderful.”
Working with a host Rotary club in India, these sums
will make clean drinking water and basic sanitation facilities available to
villagers in Sarurpur, a poor village of 50,000+ near New Delhi. The community
has about 8,000 households, more than 4,000 of which have no sanitation facilities.
Open defecation is a serious issue both in terms of health and human dignity. There
is no central facility to supply clean drinking water. Some households have
hand pumps and use shallow, untreated groundwater. Other households use
contaminated piped water.
The WASH project will establish two to three public
sanitation facilities, each of which will have eight to 10 toilets. Facilities
will be equipped with untreated water – obtained through submersible pumps – stored
in tanks.
To provide drinking water, the project will train and
employ local workers to build about 1,000 biosand filters. This proved technology
originated with the Calgary-based Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation
Technology (CAWST).
“To put this water and sanitation project in context,
it is worth remembering some basic differences between developed and developing
countries,” said Anil Jain. “In developed countries, clean drinking water
arrives from large, complex centralized facilities through networks of
underground pipelines to homes, businesses and public facilities. Sanitation
facilities are much the same, taking sewage from place of origin to centralized
treatment facilities.”
Because these facilities require substantial financial
resources, he said, they have “high maintenance and operational costs, and
require technical and management skills for proper operation and maintenance. This
approach is not the solution for clean water issues in rural India.” By
contrast, the WASH project aims to address basic water and sanitation issues around
Sarurpur. “The proponents have done a great deal of research to determine the
best technologies and approaches for this project,” he said. However, he did
acknowledge that “plan changes may be necessary once implementation begins.”
Jain recently visited the community. Locals have given
the project “enthusiastic support,” he said. “The headman is designating land
sites to build public sanitation facilities on.” Once the project
is completed, it will be managed by staff from the Maya Devi hospital in the
village.
That hospital originated only three
years ago, after it received preliminary funding from the Rotary clubs of
Calgary Centennial and RC Calgary. Now operated by Calgary-based CHILD
Foundation and MOTHER Foundation in India, the hospital has become a rural centre
of excellence. It provides quality health care and health education to women
and children in Sarurpur. “In many ways,” Jain said, “the hospital has already transformed
the community.”
The largest single project ever
undertaken by the Rotary Club of Calgary Centennial, Anil Jain’s WASH project is
a great example of how “wonderful” things can happen when Rotary clubs
collaborate.
