About three years ago, local residents of Darechowk, a small village in Chitwan, southern Nepal, installed a message board reading ?Take a Pee and Get One Rupee?. The sight of the board placed near Kurintar along Prithivi Highway, about 70km from Kathmandu, filled everyone with wonder. 

The message kept springing surprises as, unlike in other public places where one has to pay for using toilets to urinate, Darechwok paid one rupees each to the visitors who used toilets to answer the call of nature.

?The money (one rupee) was paid by locals for passing urine that was later used as a biological fertiliser in agriculture, including vegetables,? said Shreedhar Pokhrel, a local resident and chairperson of SEWA Nepal, an NGO working to promote the use of human urine as fertiliser in Darechowk.

Three years since the inception of this innovative approach, locals of the village are ready to celebrate the first ever National Urine Day on Friday. 

?After successfully demonstrating the use of urine at both household and community levels, now it is time to highlight the efforts at both the national and the global level,? said Pokhrel. 

Representatives from all bodies concerned, including government, non-government, community and mediapersons, are attending a programme on Friday to mark the day coinciding with Sithi Nakha, an annual festival related to cleansing of water sources in the Newari community.

Urine collection started in the village after the construction of an Eco-San, also called Ecological Sanitation, as part of a total sanitation movement launched in the district. Darechwok was declared an Open Defecation Free (ODF) village in July, 2010, after it successfully built toilets in each individual household. 

Eco-San toilet is a well-known technology that has two different compartments to collect urine and faeces to prevent infection. The urine collected is treated and used in agricultural fields within the two months of collection, while faeces is collected for six months or more, decomposed and treated before using in farmland.

According to Pokhrel, the growing level of awareness among the locals, who were defecating in open places earlier, has led to different positive community-level approach towards safe and healthy local environment.
More than 750, out of a total of over 1,600 households, in Darechowk have built Eco-San toilets and are regularly using urine to grow crops. 

?The use of compost fertiliser obtained from urine has not only helped replace urea and other harmful chemical fertilisers to some extent, but has also 
contributed towards a healthy life of the villagers,? said Rajesh Adhikari of Environment and Public Health Organisation, an NGO promoting the use of Eco-San technology throughout the country.

source:

Pragati Shahi

The Kathmandu Post

Publication Date : 14-06-2013

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