A study on the wash practices and the practice of open defecation, the factors leading to this practice and its health implications in rural Lucknow

Objective: To study the level of awareness about the importance of various hygiene and sanitation practices on the health of the individuals and also to assess the burden of open defecation in the rural setting in Lucknow district and understand the various factors which lead to the practice of open defecation in the community. Methodology: It was a systematic random sampling where the list of all the households in both the villages was obtained from the ASHA and thus using systematic random sampling every 10th household was selected. If the respondent was not available or not willing to participate then the next household was selected Results: 44% of the respondents had primary education, Majority of the respondent’s i.e around 57% were employed as manual labourers whereas only a small section i.e 16.4% was in farming, Around 64% of the male respondents were educated while taking into account the female respondents around 49% of the female respondents were educated. For 78% of the respondents the source of water was government while for the rest the source of water was private and located in the same yard or the house where they were living. 52% of them said they did not do anything to make it safe while 30% said that they always treated water to make it safe for drinking while the rest 18% said that they did not treat the water regularly. Around 59.9% of the respondents said that they were aware about the relationship. Only around 34% of the respondents had a toilet facility in their households while majority of them ie 66.4% did not have any kind of toilet facility in their home. When asked whether the toilet facility was functional or not about 77% of the respondents said that the toilet facility was non-functional and it was used for other purposes like storage etc. 60% of the cases the respondents said that there was some member in the family who was going out for open defecation. When the reason for going out for open defecation was asked, many themes like unavailability of the toilets, poverty or the lack of the resources to construct a toilet, old norms of going out in the field and improperly constructed toilets and the feeling of being suffocated inside a toilet were cited out. Conclusion: The most important themes which came to focus in this study were the old social norms and the lack of the resources and poverty in constructing a toilet which was leading to the practice of open defecation. Further it was also seen that in many of the cases even when the respondent had adequate knowledge about the ill effects of open defecation, still they were bound to go for open defecation because they had no other option. Although majority of the respondents were well aware of the importance of maintaining hygiene they were not practicing it due to various constraints like the social economic barriers etc.