Great news.
“We had to do fierce campaigning,” going door-to-door for years, said Mohammed Badal Sarker, chairman of a local village council. The council even turned children into whistleblowers — literally.
“We provided schoolchildren with whistles to alert the villagers. It worked like magic,” the chairman said. Children were encouraged to shout slogans like “Defecating in the open is the enemy of the people” and “No one will marry your daughter if you do not have a toilet at home.”
The drive has even sparked a new industry in household sanitation, with small businesses cropping up across the country to sell the components for making inexpensive latrines. All it takes, they say, is an investment of $12 to $60 to buy two to three concrete rings and a concrete pan.
“Now you will not find a home without a sanitary latrine,” Sarkar said.