Our Motivation
The idea for SHRI Foundation emerged when the organization’s co-founders, Chandan and Prabin, were in Bihar, one of the states in eastern India. They were hoping to start a public health organization that would serve the needs of the community. Bihar has long been one of India’s poorest states with myriad public health challenges. But conversations with doctors, community health workers, and local residents centered around one large issue - the high prevalence of open defecation due to the lack of household toilets.
Residents described the shame, fear, and disgust associated with having to defecate in the open. But they also described being too poor to build a private household toilet, or not owning sufficient dwelling space for one. And in some cases, residents felt discouraged from building a household toilet because of the paltry piped sewer network in rural Bihar.
SHRI Foundation was designed to help India’s poorest and most marginalized households overcome these barriers to toilet access. SHRI Foundation did this by identifying communities with low household-toilet coverage and work with local communities and other stakeholders majorly government to build, from the ground up, new shared facilities that could be used for free by the community’s residents. These facilities were equipped with biogas tanks so that the waste could be treated onsite. Finally, SHRI Foundation would staff these facilities and ensure that they were providing high-quality sanitation services every day as a way to motivate consistent use. “Owning” every stage of the process enabled us to become experts in the various aspects of facility construction and management.
Our work almost coincided with the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan which was launched around the same time. As a part of this program, the government invested heavily in household toilets as a way to reduce the burden of open defecation. As a result, crores of individual household toilets were constructed over the last decade. However, crores of households were unable to build private toilets due to poverty, space constraints, and tenuous land rights. Recognizing these barriers to private household toilet ownership, the government built over 6 lakh community sanitation facilities. However, such facilities often become dirty, lack water for flushing and self-cleaning due to various reasons largely around operation and maintenance of these facilities. The combination of these factors deters facility use, forcing more than 20 crores people to revert to open defecation, putting them at risk for enteric infections like cholera, sexual assault, and adverse mental health outcomes.
2025 marks SHRI Foundation’s tenth anniversary, a time for us to celebrate our successes and update our strategic approach based on the lessons we have learned. Instead of building brand new facilities and operating them, SHRI Foundation will:
Identify-government-built community and institutional facilities that India’s most vulnerable women, children, and men rely on for their sanitation needs
Implement-its operating and monitoring system so that these facilities provide consistently high quality sanitation services
Evaluate-the impact of its system on facility cleanliness and safety
Influence-sanitation policies within India and globally so that the provision of high-quality community and institutional sanitation is prioritized