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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Understanding the Problems of India's Sanitation Workers -Nirat Bhatnagar

Understanding the Problems of India's Sanitation Workers -Nirat Bhatnagar

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published Published on Nov 15, 2018   modified Modified on Nov 15, 2018
-TheWire.in

While no one can argue that India may moving in the right direction in terms of sanitation, all is not well.

Despite increasing focus by the government and programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, unsafe sanitation work, loosely captured under the catch-all phrase manual scavenging, still exists in India. There are five million people employed in sanitation work of some sort in India with about two million of them working in ‘high risk’ conditions.

Here is the first article in a series which introduces the situation of sanitation workers in the country, their different personas, the challenges they face, and the solutions that are essential to improving this situation.

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The last few years have been the golden age for sanitation in India. What started out as the Total Sanitation Campaign in the 1990s morphed into the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan under the UPA Government and then transformed into the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan with full gusto driven by the prime minister’s special attention. This translated directly into increased budgets, a mission-mode implementation across the country and by official estimates, 80 million additional toilets getting constructed. Now, over 89% of the country’s population has access to a household toilet, compared to 40% in 2014.

Movie stars such as Akshay Kumar made sanitation a household name and through movies such as Toilet Ek Prem Katha, sanitation crossed over into the mainstream. A special focus on financing and participation by the private sector followed, with several prominent companies announcing large initiatives and several banks committing to financing sanitation.

While there is some skepticism about the results achieved and also the methods adopted to achieve these results, at least on the formal record, 457 out of the nearly 700 districts in India are now “open defecation free”.

And the trajectory seems to be changing. With October 2019 fast approaching, there has been a very real shift in the dialogue within the government and the entire sanitation ecosystem, with most actors now emphasising a shift away from just construction of toilets to their actual use, maintenance and most importantly, treatment of waste. This has led to an increasing focus on business models and tenders focused on decentralised waste treatment with several states issuing tenders for faecal sludge and septage management. The vocabulary is also shifting from open-defecation free to ODFS/ODF+, which are frameworks that measure the safe disposal of waste.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 13 November, 2018, https://thewire.in/labour/understanding-the-problems-of-indias-sanitation-workers


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