How clean are our rivers? Latest data indicates a negative trend. A report by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), which was released in September this year, reveals that in total there were 45 river stretches across the country in 2016-17, where water quality is found to be the worst. In 2014-15, however, the total number of such river stretches was just 34. Technically speaking, the value of biochemical oxygen demand...
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Manual scavenger count rises, despite ban -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph The number, according to the figures reported by the states in 2015, was around 13,770. The latest survey found 20,596 manual scavengers in 2018 New Delhi: Manual scavenging has been banned since 1993 but there has been little impact on the ground. The latest data from a survey conducted by the National Safai Karamcharis Finance & Development Corporation this year on manual scavengers has found their number has risen by over...
More »These superwomen from Himachal Pradesh show why empowered women make for an empowered country -Raksha Kumar
-The Hindu Bhuira's women are coping with the higher workload by creating vastly more flexible family and community structures. And they are simultaneously pushing towards modernity much faster than their neighbours. Everyone in the village sneaks a glance when Upasana Kumari drives her White Maruti 800 to work. “Driving a car is intoxicating,” says Kumari. A winding, muddy, single lane road that starts from the edge of the hillock where Kumari’s house...
More »UP Is Fudging Numbers Under Swachh Bharat to Achieve 'Open Defecation Free' Goal -Kabir Agarwal
-TheWire.in An unverified claim on paper that each household that appears on a 2012 list, which may or may not include all households in the village, has a toilet built for use, is enough to declare the particular village ODF. Lucknow/ Barabanki: In late September, the second floor of Vikas Bhawan in Lucknow is buzzing with activity and smelling foul. The activity is centred around achieving cleaner sanitary facilities for the...
More »'When a brother goes down a sewer to clean it, we look the other way' -Sudha G Tilak
-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...
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