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Winning
heArts
Pooja Gupta overcame
administrative challenges and
connected with the people to make
Gurdaspur district in Punjab open
defecation free
t he dichotomy in rural living is stark in
Gurdaspur district of Punjab. People
indulge in lavish marriages, possess
smartphones and ride around on the latest
motorcycles but continue to defecate in the
open. With 31% toilet coverage as per the 2012
baseline survey (BLS) of the Swachh Bharat
Mission-Gramin (SBM-G), sanitation evidently
wasn’t a priority and toilets were not felt as a
necessity by its rural residents.
It was here that the Delhi-bred Pooja
Gupta (25) was deployed as a prerak under the
Zila Swachh Bharat Prerak (ZSBP) programme.
A computer science engineer from Bhagwan
Mahaveer Institute of Engineering and
Technology (BMIET), Haryana, with a masters
degree in marketing and communications
from Institute of Management Technology,
Nagpur, Pooja enrolled for the Teach
My most treasured India programme during her final year in
engineering. Later, while pursuing her masters,
moment came during a she taught computer skills to youngsters in
sanitation awareness campaign rural areas near her college. Pooja joined the
when girls from a primary ZSBP programme as she felt it was the perfect
opportunity to bring about social change.
school in Gurdaspur block She was deployed to Gurdaspur district in
came up to me and said ‘we April 2017.
want to become like you.’ ”
MuLtIPLE CHALLEnGES
Pooja Gupta, prerak There were many reasons for Gurdaspur’s
Gurdaspur, Punjab disappointing coverage numbers. One was
people’s stubborn refusal to build toilets unless
4 4 TATA WATER MISSION -
TATA WATER MISSION - A Tata Trusts InitiativeA Tata Trusts Initiative
