preliminary study of a Water, Hygiene and Ecological Sanitation project in a rural village in Bihar state of India.

Abstract: There are 2.6 billion people who have no access to "improved sanitation" all over the world, of which 814 million people live in India. As a result of this, people resort to open defecation and this causes serious damage to the people‟s health and also pollutes the surrounding environment. This thesis explores the sanitation situation in a village called Mohaddipur in the Bind Block of Nalanda district in the state of Bihar, India. This SIDA financed project will provide this village with a public toilet complex which will be constructed with the help of the community members and strive towards putting an end to open defecation which is practised by these community members of the study area. Through the sanitation facilities being provided it was also important to close the nutrient cycle loop between agriculture and sanitation and make this toilet complex sustainable in all aspects of sustainability: social, economic, environmental and cultural. The provision of Ecological Sanitation (ecosan) facilities through the implementation of CompostEra toilet units and technology, in the toilet complex, in both the „hardware‟ and the „software‟ aspects is studied in this thesis. Women and adolescent girls were sensitised through education on Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) to empower these women in this village of Mohaddipur to not only improve their health but to also get an opportunity to get an education and gain a livelihood. Participatory Action Research (PAR) method has been used in this study to empower the community of this village in order to increase the social, educational, gender and economic strength of the individuals. The results and subsequent discussion show the need to include communities in designing a sanitation facility and how capacity building is a very important step in this process. The findings suggest that the benefits of ecosan seem to be significant enough to outweigh the negative cultural sentiments regarding the use of human excrements.