Mavudi, a remote tribal hamlet in Salur mandal, can now boast itself as a model on using individual household toilets.
It was declared Open Defecation Free (ODF) a couple of months ago. In spite of not having running water, the tribal people fetch water from borewells and use them.
Collector Vivek Yadav, ITDA Project Officer Lakshmi Sha, and the media visited the hamlet for an interaction with the beneficiaries and also Panchali village in Pachipenta mandal, where the officials laid the stone for 231 Solid Wealth Processing Centres (SWPC) on Wednesday.
After knowing their difficulty, Mr. Yadav assured them that the problem would be solved once the World Bank released ₹1,000 crore under the external aid programme for household tap connections across the State. Out of seven borewells for a population of over 300 in the hamlet, the one at the anganwadi centre was defunct.
Mr. Lakshmi Sha said that pre-fabricated toilets would be in place shortly for the 58 hilltop tribal hamlets.
In other scheduled areas, work on 51,000 toilets out of 65,000 sanctioned was in progress.
Mavudi in Salur (ST) constituency is located between lush green hills and agriculture fields. About 120 Christian converted ST families are living in non-plastered concrete roofed houses.
Interestingly, a majority of the houses that had been sanctioned and built under the Indira Awas Yojana in 2006 have no doors and windows. They are left to the vagaries of nature.
The newly-built toilets that have asbestos as roofing and doors are neatly plastered. The CC roads with drains on either side look clean. The GCC store at a corner displays the essential commodities available with it. A majority of the tribal people, who are semi-literate, eke out a living as farm workers in the fields owned by a missionary in the hamlet. Srirapu Nageswara Rao, a 7th class dropout, is one among them. He gets ₹200 per day for toiling in the fields.
However, Konda Tamara Chinnammi has two acres of land nearby a hill. She raised cotton under ‘konda podu’ and reaped three quintals per acre. She said the IAY houses were sanctioned and built by former Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy.
