sewers sans proper protective gears

 From the 1993 act, the law introduced surveys to enumerate manual scavengers, wrote stringent punishments for those employing them, guaranteed a rehabilitation assistance of Rs 40,000, a financial assistance to build homes under Indira Awas Yojana, and promised protective gear for sanitation workers, among other things. But the latest survey data released in ost, low water consumption and ease of construction. They underline how India’s burden of open defecation is in fact, deeply entrenched in its social structures and norms. The cost of a toilet based on the same design is about Rs 2,000 in Bangladesh, say studies. This trends again seems unique to India. It is with the ministry of social justice and empowerment. The WHO estimates only 15 per cent of Indian households with toilets have double pit toilets, against 40 per cent in fellow low-income countries.

The book illustrates that 46 of 55 countries with lower GDP than India, and 19 of 21 countries with a higher burden of people below the poverty line, have far lower rates of open defecation.Also read: In mad race for targets, Modi’s Swachh Bharat could fumble the same way UPA plans didFinally, India’s sanitation policies, including SBA, have done embarrassingly little for its foot soldiers – those who collect the waste we generate. Not just that, most manual scavengers who would be employed to clean the dry toilets would possibly be Dalit women. The bacteria that decompose the faeces cannot survive beneath this height.  There is one other social norm linked to sanitation that deserves mention here.Also read: No, Modi’s Swachh Bharat is not like earlier sanitation measures, it’s much betterWhile Iyer’s effort may well be laudable, that it still takes such imagery to normalise the act of cleaning one’s own toilet is worrying.

It would seem that the important ‘c’ in Swachh Bharat is not cleanliness but caste. Additionally, there has not been a single conviction for employing manual scavengers. He was lauded because he“did not even use gloves”.  When one of these pits reaches its capacity, it is closed, and the household switches to the other pit, leaving the faeces to decompose in the former. Perhaps this is why despite aggressive govement promotion, more expensive sanitation toilets outnumber these basic double pit toilets.Meanwhile, thousands of sanitary workers and manual scavengers continue to go down sewers sans proper protective gears every day. Similarly, little has been done towards information, education and communication campaigns to spread awareness about the double-pit design and its excellent science. But Indians spend as much as Rs 21,000 to build these toilets. On paper, India enacted the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act in 1993, and then the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act in 2013.ThePrint’s YouTube channel is now active and buzzing.442Shares. The focus has been on subsidising toilet construction, leaving people to manage their own waste, which in tu clashes with these deep-rooted ideas of purity. Any attempt to integrate social norms into sanitation policy would do well to acknowledge this potentially dangerous gender tilt, and act to prevent it, even as ODF targets are celebrated. In the absence of any infrastructure for waste disposal, who will clean the thousands of dry toilets being built with such frenzy? He says the responsibility would fall on impoverished Dalits who society still decrees as the rightful performers of this duty.

As a result, in addition to the central govement funding of Rs 12,000 for building toilets, often rural Indian households pump in more money for bigger and deeper pits – even though a pit that is too deep may be counterproductive to the requirements of anaerobic decomposition.  But how does a population, which would do anything to remain blissfully oblivious of how its waste is disposed, gets used to a toilet structure that necessitates it to touch the faeces, albeit in a decomposed state?Also read: Amitabh Bachchan may be a great actor but even he can’t get Indians into toilets for ModiThe two pits in these toilets are dug below the ground level, and their inner walls are honeycombed with bricks for bacteria to decompose the faeces anaerobically. But in rural India, the approach has been the diametrical opposite. Here, Bangladesh should be seen as an example to PPR Ball Valve Manufacturers lea from.  Cleaning of toilets has been regarded as a polluting and lowly task reserved for the lowest rungs in society, the Dalits.)Pritha Chatterjee is a joualist and a PhD student in population health sciences at Harvard University. One such widely shared post was an image of the secretary in the ministry of drinking water and sanitation, Parameswaran Iyer, going down a double-pit toilet in a rural home and cleaning it. But the low-cost, double-pit  And yet, the silence of repeated govements in acknowledging caste as integral to India’s sanitation policy is resounding.Ironically, the mandate for identification of and welfare provisions for manual scavengers is not even within the ambit of SBA or its parent ministry of drinking water and sanitation. However, the Magsaysay award-winning Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), the petitioner in the Supreme Court case on sanitation worker deaths, say they have collected information on atleast 1,560 deaths during the same period. Read the first and second part