E-BOOK : Yojana Magazine, January 2015

E-BOOK : Yojana Magazine, January 2015

CONTENTS

 
SANITATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN INDIA
Vijayan K Pillai, Rupal Parekh ................................................................7
OBSTACLES TO ‘TOTAL SANITATION’ :
EVIDENCE FROM DISTRICT LEVEL HOUSEHOLD SURVEY Gregory Pierce .......................................................................................14

SPECIAL ARTICLE
FACTOR INCOME INEqUALITIES IN INDIA: CONTOURS AND IMPLICATIONS
Tulsi Jayakumar .....................................................................................20
URBAN SANITATION IN INDIA:
A GROWTH STORY GONE AWRY
Trisha Agarwala .....................................................................................28

FOCUS
TECHNOLOGY AND PUBLIC POLICY INTERACTION: THE GREEN REVOLUTION
T N Srinivasan, Pavan Katkar................................................................33
SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN: MARGINALISING THE MAINSTREAM
Poornima Chikarmane ...........................................................................46
SOCIAL ExCLUSION IN THE CONTExT OF SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN
Kanika Kaul ...........................................................................................51 
SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN:
A TOOL FOR PROGRESSIVE INDIA
K N Pathak .............................................................................................56

J&K WINDOW.................................................................................60

DETERMINANTS OF FDI: COMPARATIVE STUDY ON INDIA AND CHINA
Neha Saini, Monica Singhania ..............................................................62

BIOTOILET: STATE-OF-THE-ART MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN WASTE
Huzaifa Khorakiwala .............................................................................67

SANITATION, DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE: CLEANING OF HOLY MINDS
Bhasha Singh .........................................................................................70

DO YOU KNOW? ..............................................................................74

HOW SAFE ARE THE TOILETS? UNDERSTANDING ISSUES INVOLVED IN  TOILET ACCESS FOR WOMEN
Aarushie Sharma, Asmita Aasaavari, Srishty Anand .............................76

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP
NORTH EAST DIARY    .........................................................81

Let us begin with a story, in fact an episode in Gandhiji’s life. Year 1998. Durban, South Africa. Gandhijee was practising as a lawyer and often his office clerks stayed with him at his house. Once a Christian clerk born of ‘panchama parents’ stayed with him. The rooms had provision of chamber-pots for collecting excreta which were cleaned by Kasturba in the morning. However, she was not happy cleaning the excreta of a lower caste person, nor did she want Gandhijee to do the same. Gandhijee insisted that she do it and do it cheerfully. He writes in his autobiography, ‘I forgot myself, and the spring of compassion dried up in me. I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate, which was just opposite the ladder, and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out.’ Gandhi recollects it with a sense of shame on himself. This story has an important insight into Gandhi’s understanding of the linkage between the issue of cleanliness and the caste dimension of it. Gandhi’s deep involvement with the issue of sanitation was not merely a question of personal hygiene or even municipal cleanliness but it linked with his holistic understanding of the world. It, in a sense, defined the multi-dimensional relationship between the individual, society and the state. He understood that in South Africa, sanitation was a political question that gave the British the alibi to perpetuate apartheid and racial segregation. The struggle for the rights of Indians and coloured Africans could not be de-linked from the imperatives of cleanliness and personal hygiene. There is a consistent thread running from his South Africa days to the time in 1947-48 when he made it a point to stay in the colony of manual scavengers in Delhi. He understood and believed that merely talking about sanitation would be meaningless unless the stigma and social exclusion associated with it is not challenged. Indeed, sanitation for Gandhi had a radical content, a transformative potential. Once again, the issue of sanitation has come into the mainstream with the government launching a nation-wide programme of cleanliness. It is true that sanitation programme has been part of government policy for a long time but earlier it did not get the ‘big push’ both in terms of administrative effort as well as media coverage. Now, the government is committed to spend a large sum of money over the next few years on urban waste management, construction of toilets, public education on the issue of hygiene and cleanliness in close cooperation with the state government and private sector like industries, corporate bodies, NGOs etc. However, special attention needs to be paid to the people on whose shoulders the day to day responsibility of ensuring cleanliness of the sewers, latrines, offices and municipal spaces rests. There are lakhs of sanitation workers who are working at very low wages and suffering inhuman conditions of work. Socially, these workers belong to the weakest section of society. There are also a huge number of people working as rag pickers and waste-collectors, a large number of them below the age of 14. They have no social security. It is shocking to know that ‘90 percent of India’s sanitation workers die before they turn 60 after contracting various infectious diseases’. Clearly, in the context of cleanliness, questions relating to exclusion and dignity need to be fore-fronted and to be tackled with the same determination and political will as is being done in case of financial resources and administrative mainstreaming of the programme. It has a great symbolic value that Gandhijee has been brought into the centre of this exercise by the government as an icon and inspiration. The symbolic value of the pair of Gandhi’s spectacles would be truly respected when the country does not have a single death of a sewer worker cleaning the manhole or a rag picker child dying of an infectious disease. And yes, Gandhiji would flash his contented smile when persons from all castes and not only Dalits, willingly and happily
come up to take up the job of a Safai-Karmachari in a modernised sewerage cleaning municipal system in the country. Bapu, bless us that it does not take too long

Sanitation and Social Change in India

of the 2.6 billion people who lack toilet facilities, nearly 650 million live in India. In order to address this gigantic problem of sanitation, the Government of India has launched a nationwide "Clean India Program.” The success of this programme and in particular, its sustainability is likely to depend upon its coherence with the social structural forces, which drive poor sanitary conditions. The purpose of this study is to explore the social structural context of sanitation in India. We propose a multivariate model of sanitation and assess its empirical validity with data from the National Family Health Survey – III. We find that modernization plays a significant role in improving sanitary conditions. More importantly, we suggest that in order for the programme to be successful, we need strong political will which will bring modern amenities and public health education to the door steps of the people. The world population is expected to reach about 9.6 billion by 2050 and nearly 66 per cent of this population will be living in urban areas (Porter, Dyball, Dumaresq, Deutsch & Matsuda, 2014; Evans, 1998). This means an addition of early 2.4 billion to the current population with the percentage of population urban increasing 12 per cent by 2050. Population growth is high in developing countries such as India where, though there has been a decline in total fertility rates in recent decades, the population size continues to increase rapidly owing to population momentum (Chandrasekhar, 2013). Although, the proportion of urban population is lower in developing countries than in developed countries, nearly 53 per cent of the world's urban population lives in developing countries in Asia. Perhaps, one of the most undesirable consequences of rampant population growth and urbanization is the collapse of sanitary conditions resulting in poor population health (Rayner & Lang, 2013). The failure of public programmes and policies in most developing countries to address basic sanitation issues is indicated by the fact that between 1990 and 2008, the share of the world’s population with access to basic sanitation increased only from 54 per cent to 61 per cent and that, even today, nearly 2.6 billion people world-wide have no toilet
facilities (Majra & Gur, 2008; Moe

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