More than brooms

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat mission has captured the national imagination. Financial advisors are betting on the stocks of ceramic sanitaryware companies. Well-groomed men and women are appearing in group photos, broom in hand. At long last, Indians abroad are hopeful that the one thing they’ve been ashamed of all these years, the ‘open defecation’ back home, will be banished finally. It has been a while since an Indian politician has given a call that has resonated at so many levels.

Indian policy has been concerned about the ‘unwashed masses’ for nearly three decades now — from the community rural sanitation programme of 1986 and the Total Sanitation Campaign of 1999 to the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan of 2012. It will clearly take more than moral force and aspiration for Swachh Bharat to break free of the legacy of these programmes. It brings to attention questions of governance and social justice in sanitation. After all, sanitation is not just a moral value. It is business, and business needs acumen.

Commentators have rightly pinpointed the financial outlays needed — an estimated ₹2 lakh crore divided 2:1 between rural and urban segments, according to the Union Government. It is hoped that state governments will contribute 25 per cent of this, besides generous contributions from corporate social responsibility. A close reading shows that the commentaries have focused on three aspects — positive externalities (health improvement and infant mortality, in particular), backward linkages (sanitary fixtures and construction) and public morality (voluntary effort).

There is little on sanitation infrastructure, including toilets and sewage disposal, municipal solid-waste management, and caste and sanitation labour conditions. Each of these reflects a profound failure of governance and social justice delivery systems.

Both in rural and urban areas, the focus has for long been on individual toilets. Various methods have been adopted to coax households to install private toilets. Reasons for persisting open defecation range from cultural barriers, local corruption and apathy at higher levels to systemic problems such as barring toilet owners from poverty-related entitlements.

However, it is clear that in both rural and urban areas, access to toilets is largely a matter of access to adequate housing. It is a fact that those without housing, without a secure tenure, have no access to toilets. In urban areas, the problem is compounded by lack of access to secure workplaces, which results in lack of secure access to toilets and health costs at the household level. Interestingly, this crisis is not unique to India. Even in North America, lack of access to public toilets is a hazard for thousands of people who spend much of their lives on the streets.

In the Indian economy, the street is the workplace (and resting place) for a large number of people. Adequate sanitation infrastructure calls for public investments. Without these, people are forced to either use the street to relieve themselves or withhold and pay with their health and productivity.

Also, solid waste management is assumed to be an urban problem. But it’s increasingly clear that not only is solid waste a looming problem for thousands of urbanising rural areas, but several urban local bodies have been displacing their waste problems onto rural areas. Most cities are locating landfills in rural areas with impunity. This unequal distribution of the costs of sanitation has already led to agitations in several cities including Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Perverse affirmative action

Finally, an overwhelming majority of the sanitation workers across Indian cities belong to the former untouchable castes. This is true whether in sewage disposal or in municipal solid waste management. Sanitation has been the only sector in which positive discrimination in employment has virtually lost all meaning. Most cities in India began outsourcing sanitation work in the mid 1990s so much so that today, over two thirds of sanitation workers in Indian cities are either casual workers or self employed.

If the goals of the Swachh Bharat mission are to be accomplished through public-private partnerships as announced, then the government should seriously examine the nature of the revenue models and incentive structures. No doubt the government cannot make available the resources entirely on its own. But one input from it is a must: regulation. This means statutory backing for context-sensitive design, and operation manuals and codes for governance structures.

( Anant Maringantiis an urban geographer and director of Hyderabad Urban Lab ).

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