P. G. Sudha is the woman Forest Officer who has built 497 toilets for tribal people in Kerala. The journey of building the toilets was not simple but she was determined to bring the change in the lives of the tribal people residing in the Kerala Ernakulam district. The initiative was taken under the Central government campaign called Open Defecation Free (ODF). In the initial years, none of the contractors were willing to take the contract of building the toilets in the tribal zone areas. The reason was that it was inconvenient to carry the materials to the dense forest where the tribals lived.
Therefore, the crucial duty of building the toilet was given to PG Sudha by the district collector of the Ernakulam. When she was appointed with the task of building toilets, she proudly recalls how she and her team fought to carry the building materials, "With the help of rafts, we managed to navigate all the materials to the designated locations near the tribal colonies. Since there aren't proper roads or even a pathway in these regions, we had to move all the workers in jeeps. The monetary requirements of the project were mobilized through Panchayat funds. Because I could figure out an economical alternative for every step, the overall expenses fell quite well within the allocated budget, and we managed to accomplish what I had envisioned way ahead of time,"
She is a strong woman who never gave up and faced every odd to teach the tribal people how to adapt to the modern ways of living. Apart from building toilets, she and her associates also did several workshops to raise awareness about the harmful effects of defecating in the open. And the good news was that she was successful in making the tribal people understand the importance of health and hygiene. After those workshops, they maintained the habit of using the toilets. The change is not so vast but still, she has managed to touch nine tribal colonies of Kerala.
She is a woman forest officer as well as a woman social worker. Her hardships didn’t go unnoticed, because she has received a Best Forest Guard Award by the Chief Minister of Kerala in the year 2006. She also received awards for making Kerala tribes free of open defecation. And lastly, she also holds the prestigious award from the former president of India Pranab Mukherjee, title Nari Shakti Puraskar.
