Mumbai: Thirteen-year-old Ashwini Bandu Ughade from Akola, Maharashtra, fought off a leopard some eight months ago to save her little sister from the animal’s jaws when she was out answering nature’s call.

For her heroic act, she will receive the National Bravery Award along with 23 other young bravehearts, four of whom have been given the award posthumously, on January 24 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a special function. The children will also participate in the Republic Day parade while the President of India and several other dignitaries will also host receptions in their honour. Several states will also organise functions to honour them at the state level.

The children have been selected by a high-powered committee comprising representatives of various ministries, departments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as office-bearers of the Indian Council of Child Welfare.

The danger faced by Ughade highlights the plight of scores of children, and adults, who are compelled to defecate in the open as toilet facilities are largely absent in rural India.

For Ughade, defecating in the open was an everyday affair. She said, “As usual I had to go out to defecate in the nearby forest accompanying my younger sister when a leopard suddenly attacked my sister. I hit the leopard’s head with mangoes and pulled her out of the animal’s jaws after which it fled.”

Children have often been victims of not just animal attacks, but humans who prey on these young ones when they are defecating in the open. Even in Mumbai young children have been dragged away or attacked by leopards that stray out of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivili into nearby residential areas.

The fact is that while the government has awarded the girl’s courage with an award, the reality is that Ughade will return back to her village — to an unchanged environment.

According to the Unicef, which launched the Take the Poo to the Loo programme some years ago, the use of improved sanitation is an enormous challenge to India where 59.4 per cent of rural households do not have toilet facilities. Seven states (Orissa, Meghalaya, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) account for almost 50 per cent (13.8 million) children without access to toilet facilities in schools.

Adolescent girls are especially vulnerable to dropping out as many are reluctant to continue their schooling because toilet facilities are not private, not safe or simply not available. The number of schools in India with separate toilet facilities for girls increased from 0.4 million (37 per cent) in 2005-2006 to 0.8 million (60 per cent) in 2010.

The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation will launch a nationwide real-time monitoring campaign to note the use of toilets this month. The monitoring system aims to galvanise Swachh Bharat Mission, which aims to attain a 100 per cent Open Defecation Free India by 2019, into action. People from across the country will be mobilised to check and verify the use of toilets in the rural areas though mobile phones, tablets or iPads and upload the same in case of any discrepancy of data on the ministry’s website.

Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained on a sustained basis.