Novel move by techie helps widow of BPL family get toilet

Software engineer by profession, Dinesh Saravanan (30), was also involved in social works and was a part of Chennai based Abdul Kalam Students Welfare and Service Association. Saravanan, working in Chennai but a resident of a Vellore, used to visit Vellore during weekends. With a passion for social work, he wanted to extend his altruistic activity to Vellore town also.

In the beginning, Saravanan had distributed around 1,000 saplings to homes in the area, purchased from a private nursery at Rs 8 per plant. Later, when the summer peaked in Vellore some days ago, Dinesh had provided the traffic police on duty with free buttermilk.

Regarding the expenditure, he said, “I will circulate Whatsapp messages to my friends on the projects that I am doing and the funds required. My blog also contains details of income and expenditure including all the relevant bills. Meanwhile, the leftover funds will be utilised for the next project.”

He said that while he was planning to provide rice and provisions to 2 poor families for 3 months, “Latha (36), a widow along with two girls requested him to build a toilet as her daughter studying in Class 10 had attained puberty.”

The beneficiary Latha talking to DT Next said, “We used to go to the fields to answer nature’s call before sunrise and after sunset. Hence, we got many health problems as we were retaining from urinating for long.”

When approached, civic officials had said that toilet construction under the Central government’s Swacch Bharat scheme was already over in Vellore. So, Saravanan sought quotations from various local contractors and chose the lowest cost at Rs 37,250 for construction. The work started in Latha’s Pudu street house at Alamelmangapuram on Saturday and is expected to be completed soon.