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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

A pit stop to change attitudes -Diane Coffey & Sangita Vyas

-The Hindu

Pit emptying must become central to India’s efforts to eliminate open defecation

Both Ambedkar and Gandhi protested the practice of untouchability by encouraging upper castes to deal with their own waste. Last weekend, the Secretary of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Parameswaran Iyer, took up their call for action by emptying the decomposed waste from a twin-pit latrine in Warangal district, Telangana. Mr. Iyer deserves praise for calling attention to the fact that the problem of pit emptying must become central to India’s efforts to eliminate open defecation.

It’s now well established that the history and continuing practice of untouchability plays an important role in explaining why there is so much open defecation in India. Studies find that many rural Indians associate emptying a latrine pit by hand with manual scavenging, work that Dalits have traditionally been compelled to do. Caste Hindus refuse to empty latrine pits themselves, and hiring someone else to do it is now expensive and complicated. This is in part because, thankfully, the exploitation and exclusion of Dalits is slowly being challenged in India, and many have abandoned degrading work.

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