It is recorded as a family decision. It is a plumbing decision.

Every one of the eleven schools in our current toilet campaign has a toilet block. Every one was built under a government scheme, and most were inaugurated properly, with a ribbon and a photograph. Not one of them works. The failure modes are dull and consistent: no water connection was ever run to the block; the pit was never dug; the doors have no latches; the roof was never finished. At two schools the block is used as a store room, which at least is an honest use. The consequence is measurable and almost never measured. An adolescent girl at a school without a private, water-connected toilet misses somewhere between four and six school days a month. Over an academic year that is fifty days — a quarter of the year. She falls behind, the falling behind compounds, and by Class 8 or 9 she stops. When the headmaster records the reason, he writes that the family withdrew her. Restoring a block properly costs about ₹78,000: doors, latches, tiling, an overhead tank, the water connection itself, and a three-year maintenance agreement with the gram panchayat so it does not silently fail again in eighteen months. Divided across the 120-odd girls in a typical school on our list, that is roughly ₹650 per girl, once. We will not be publishing photographs of the toilets or of the girls who use them. We will publish the attendance data, before and after, school by school. That is the only evidence that means anything here.