The Burden of Purity

Context:  A case for focusing on the cultural stigma associated with sanitation.

Issues on the sanitation front:

• For women: They drink less fluid and risk health rather than accessing unusable public toilets.
• For Sanitation workers: Often compelled to travel in garbage trucks and many of them are forced to carry human excreta or stand in manholes.
• Adverse effects on the tourism sector: which provides employment to the poorest of the poor.

Initiatives to address the Issues:

• Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: This initiative is promoted extensively by the prime minister and many other celebrities.
• Academic researches: E.g. Books like India Stinking (2005), Manual Scavenging in India: A Disgrace to the Country (1997).
• Policies to change perspective: Government policy to wipe off the visual representation and replace it with positive imagery.
• Legal amendments: Like the Prohibition of Employment of Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act to make the use of machines mandatory in the cleaning of manholes.

Problems associated with these initiatives:

• Ignores the heart of the issue: i.e. the caste system and how it determines Indians’ view on human and other waste, where ideas of sanitation privilege purity over hygiene
  • The problem with sanitation in India is not lack of infrastructure but the social and cultural stigma attached to it - (Rice (Research Institute for Compassionate Economics) Institute).
  • People distinguish places as pure and impure and discourage toilets in pure places. e.g. “Pure” places like temples, schools and workspaces are discouraged from including toilets.
• Non-implementation: g. cleaning machines for manholes are yet to be made mandatory, India continue to use dry latrines, and the underprivileged continue to defecate in the open.

Conclusion: Government policies and the civil society discussion on sanitation are yet to focus on the cultural stigma. It’s in this backdrop that we need to view the discussion on introducing machines to clean manholes.