Guntur: Guntur, an important city in the Capital Region, is becoming an open defecation free city. The Guntur Municipal Corporation (GMC) constructed 7,200 toilets in a record time of three months, stopping 30,000 people from open defecations.
GMC is continuing the toilets scheme on the outskirts to switch Guntur as green city. The Swachch Andhra Mission selected Guntur city as pilot project and officials led by minister for urban development, P. Narayana, conducted enumeration in the city to found houses without toilets five months ago and decided to provide toilets to 7,500 houses in the first phase of Individual Household Toilets (IHT) scheme.
The absence of toilets forced the people to go to open places to answer nature’s call. GMC assistant engineer, Rama Naik said that all the burial grounds and open places near the colonies turned into public toilets causing severe inconvenience to the public health.
Women, who don’t have toilets in their houses faced lot of difficulties. The offcials conducted motivation to the women first explaining about the immediate sanctioning of '15,000 aid from the government for construction of toilet. Further GMC provided water supply through public taps as toilet without water is not usable and their efforts yielded good results as people started coming forward for the construction of IHT in their houses. IHT beneficiaries said that women were the worst sufferers and now they are living with honour due to individual toilets.
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