Toilets and Taps: Keep Her in School

This is the least photogenic thing we do and the one that changes the most. Every one of the eleven schools on this list has a toilet block. Every one of them was built under a government scheme and inaugurated with a ribbon. And every one of them is unusable: no water connection, no door latch, no roof, or a pit that was never dug. What that means in practice is that adolescent girls stop coming to school for four or five days a month, fall behind, and then stop coming at all. The dropout is recorded as a family decision. It is a plumbing decision. ₹78,000 restores one block completely — doors, latches, tiling, an overhead tank, a working tap, and a maintenance agreement with the gram panchayat so it stays working after we leave. We will not photograph the toilets, and we will not photograph the girls. We will publish the attendance data, which is the only number that matters here.