Intoxication of Life: Essay: Analysis of Inadequate Sanitation Infrastructures and Understanding Good Practices

Abstract

Although our rural and urban areas are suffering from inadequate sanitation infrastructures, one successful solution can be conducting extensive behaviour change campaigns to involve citizens in the development of such infrastructures. Building facilities for safe water and sanitation alone will not be sufficient in a country like ours.

Introduction

Our cities and rural areas are facing multiple crises due to inadequate sanitation infrastructures in our country. To clearly understand what this means, let us first broadly categorise them under Rural and Urban. A simple sanitation chain needs to collect and isolate human waste, safely transmit this waste, and then treat this waste before reusing it or letting it out in the environment [1]. It can be fairly assumed that in urban areas a sewer system exists but it is not robust enough to fight the growing population density of the areas. There are various health issues noticed in the poor sections of urban areas i.e. 50 million people who don’t have access to proper sanitation arrangements and the improper management of the solid & liquid waste has been polluting land and water bodies. According to a study done in 2008, only 30% of India’s population had access to improved sanitation practices. This increases the cases of open defecation among the poorest strata of society. When it comes to livelihoods, the urban poor also bears the highest per capita income losses due to inadequate sanitation [2].

In the rural areas, it is found that technology spreads faster than information and understanding and the implication of such technology. According to a UN report [3], more people have access to mobile phones than toilets in India. For a very long time, both household and community toilets in rural areas, have been using septic tanks; a technology prevalently adopted from urban areas. The cleaning mechanism of a septic tank is not suitable for rural areas mostly because of two reasons – lack of sewage systems and lack of cleaning service providers via mechanical extraction. Hence, septic tanks ended up discharging the water waste outside the houses which leads to stagnation and diseases.

This lack of adequate sanitation infrastructures as well as unsafe practices is a major cause of diseases like Diarrhoea, and other water-borne diseases, which have been fatal to children under five years of age globally.

Scenario and Efforts

When we talk about the development of sanitation practices in rural areas, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) strikes the mind. The mission, although launched in 2014, was a rebranded version of the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) launched in 1999 and 2012 respectively. For the Phase-1, the Swachh Bharat Mission, administratively, has two arms – first, Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (SBM-G) under the aegis of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and second, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-Urban) under the aegis of Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. SBM-G aims to eradicate open defecation in rural areas, create awareness about safe sanitation, and improve solid-liquid waste management practices in the long run. It is important to understand that only providing household/community toilets is going to work in rural areas, they also need to be educated about them. Rural areas are a close-knit social sector where the community bonding is still stronger than in their urban counterparts, hence, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) [4] models have been effective in generating awareness and motivating the citizens to construct toilets for themselves without using the Government subsidy. The Government had a provision of providing monetary support of Rs.12000/- per Individual Household Latrine (IHHL) to achieve the vision of Swachh Bharat by 2nd October 2019. However, the CLTS teams have been parallelly working closely with the rural population in educating and motivating them to build toilets for themselves and their families. Even when the district administration got many toilets constructed in the rural areas, using them did not become a regular practice for most people for a long time. Coming out of a decades-long habit of open defecation takes time, effort, patience, constant communication, and monitoring. Regular monitoring & evaluation, and running behaviour change awareness campaigns (print, audio-visual, plays, slogans, wall paintings etc) were widespread. Another crucial part of the rural sanitation supply chain was played by the twin pit pour flush toilets [5] invented by Shri Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement. This twin-pit pour-flush toilet technology does not require human intervention as compared to septic tanks with soak pits.

The Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban teams focus on improving the sanitation chain in urban and semi-urban areas. In these areas the human excreta generated is not disposed of sustainably, thus impacting the health conditions of the urban poor, women, children, and the elderly, which covers more than 20% of the total urban population [6]. The age-old practice of manual scavenging is still prevalent, although the state administration, advocacy groups, and organisations such as Safai Karamchari Andolan have been instrumental in abolishing this custom to some extent. In Phase-2, we must concentrate on ODF+ i.e., operation and maintenance of community/public toilets and solid-liquid waste management. The twin pits used in rural sanitation programs help generate manure from human waste. From both, the urban and rural, sanitation points of view, solid waste (biodegradable & non-biodegradable) and liquid (black water and grey water waste) must be properly disposed of and composting & wastewater treatment technologies must be implemented.

Conclusion

The fundamental goal of providing adequate sanitation infrastructures is to transform India into a hygienic, sanitised, and community-driven healthy rural and urban area. The on-ground development of better public and environmental health requires effective Information, Education, & Communication (IEC) campaigns for behaviour change and regular monitoring & evaluation of the quality procedures that are being implemented to align with the Sustainable Development Goals. More than 90% of India has toilets no and about 5lakh villages have been declared ODF, however, the task at hand is getting bigger. Efforts must continue to ensure the sustainability of our current sanitation infrastructures.

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