Assessment of water availability and personal hygiene in the Vavunatheevu area of Batticaloa district: a base line study

Abstract

The current study was developed to find out the availability of the water and the sanitation approaches where the supply is diminished with the increasing demand of adequate water in Vavunatheevu area of the Batticaloa District, Sri Lanka. A predesigned questionnaire and direct observation were used to find out the water availability and the conditions of the water for the domestic and drinking water needs. The sanitation conditions which was adopted by the people was also recognized. And the information regarding those issues were analyzed using SPSS (Version 22). The results showed, more than 60% of the people used dug well in both rainy and dry season for the collection of water where the storage vessels were covered safely (48.6%) for providing protection for drinking water. Further, the shared water resource was mainly in unprotected condition (46.6%) which was in double fold while comparing with the protected conditions of the shared/common (22.6%) and household (21.9%). As far as the hygienic condition is concerned, 70.3% of the total respondents wash their hands before cooking and which was vice versa (60.1%) with the visual observation of the home nature. Around 66.4% and 70.7% of the children and adults, wash the hands before having their meals in all the situations. As the protection measure, approximately 41.7% of the total uses boiled water where the same percent of the adults and children used to adopt this. Cleaning facilities were supported with the renovation of cleaning latrine (50.2%). Not only had that, but the surrounding environment also considered a lot as the sanitation of the people where it was partially cleaned (58.3%). Among those stagnant of water (14.5%) and the untidy garden (14.5%) was predominantly visualized. As the result, the hygienic conditions of the study area should be improved a lot with the technically approved renovation approaches in future.