Chhavi Rajawat - The Sarpanch of Soda
Imagine you are suffering from loose motions but cannot step out of your house to relieve yourself till after sunset. Imagine you are sitting in an open field for defecation with no bushes to hide behind because being in arid zone, there is very little vegetation around. You are forced to stand up everytime you hear vehicle approaching or people talking and wait till they pass by and are a few hundred meters away from you. Only then you get to sit again. Imagine these interruptions happening several times during just one round of defecating in an open field! As she speaks with me in the sunny back lawn of her ancestral home in her village, I can see pain and anger in her eyes but not helplessness. Meet Chhavi Rajawat, the Sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan. When I jokingly tell her that a village called Soda gives an impression of it being a village where people are fond of drinking, she laughs and goes on to narrate all that ails her village and how she cannot let t