Ramchandra Kumar stands next to a defunct toilet in his home. He hopes to build a new, usable toilet.
Remnants of never-used toilets in a rural Bihar, India. Images by Ann Schraufnagel. India, 2015.
“I’m of the lowest caste: Harijan,” Ramchandra Kumar said at his small home in the village of Basbitti in Bihar state’s rural Supaul district. He is a sinewy, soft-spoken man. “I’m very poor. We’re mostly illiterate. We don’t know of the services the government provides because we can’t read the newspapers, we don’t go to the courthouses.”
In the morning, Kumar fills up his lota, the small cup of water with which he cleans himself, and goes to the rice fields in front of his home to defecate—but almost every day, there are women working in the area. He is forced to hold it.
Kumar is one of more than 600 million Indians who defecate in the open every day.
Read the full story by Global Health Reporting Fellow Ann Schraufnagel (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) here.
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