Instead, the landowning farmers became so ‘modern’, they don’t allow us into their fields anymore. “In 2007-08, the pradhan would come with the district authorities everyday and promised us the first government toilets if we motivated others to stop going to the fields. The expert opinion is that once initiated into using toilets, households do not go back to defecating in the open. His wife Najab Bai, 70, is back defecating in the open. Today she goes to the fields to relieve herself, with Premo accompanying her for security. She dropped out of school three years ago after Class VI to help at home. Premo’s daughter who accompanied her during patrols as a swachhata doot is now 15. A BPL-card holder who was identified in 2010 as among those entitled to a Rs 9,100 subsidy to build a toilet at home, she is still waiting for her funds. Those heady first days of the sanitation effort, however, are already long behind Premo. In the 2011 census, 87 per cent of the population in Sirsa was registered to be using toilets, the highest for a district in the country.

Starting October 2007, the Sirsa District Rural Development Authority (DRDA) adopted this “shaming” strategy among other measures as part of the UPA government’s Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) to achieve total sanitation. He cursed her, Premo says, but promised never to defecate in the open again.

Putting her own embarrassment aside, she continued trailing him, firmly blowing her whistle every time Singh attempted to sit down. She gave in, but on the third day, she did not relent. It was the same the next day, with the old man begging her to let him be. I followed him to the fields and whistled every time he would start squatting to defecate,” Premo recalls, to giggles from the crowd around her. “I remember the first time I found him, it was 5 am, around the time our daily patrolling would start. There was this old man in her village, Ratan Singh. She wore it on a red thread around her neck. Six years ago, Premo Bai of village Theri Mor Singh was given a “lal seeti (red whistle)” as a “swachhata doot (community volunteer)” working on an intensive sanitation drive lasting two and a half months in Sirsa district.

Knee deep in the doot