While it has been 6 years since India was declared ODF and hundreds of articles have been written on the topic, there is something we haven’t looked at in quite a while. The article discusses all the outcomes/possibilities and all the effects it has had on the macro and micro scales.
As an honest attempt to study all the pros
and cons will be discussed in as much detail as possible, linking to articles
and secondary data available at disposal.l
Cleanliness is next to godliness while the
phrase is contentious to its origins to whether its biblical or not,
but the message is loud and clear, the cleaner you are the closer you are to
god or any other higher power, while doctors say that being hygienic is a
personal choice and good for living a quality life we all now what india was
pre odf and the kind of filth loitered on the streets of the cities and palaces
we lived. It all changed with the Clean India Movement or the Swach Bharat Mission on 2 October 2014[1],
which changed the way our streets looked, but it was just the beginning of something
much larger change that India was about to witness.
Clean environment is the fundamental right and
duty of every individual as per UN Resolution 64/292 [2],
but Indians were denied this for a very long time. While the Swachh Bharat Mission was
initiated and made progress. While india was grappling with weak sanitation and
dirt loitering on streets and homes, and stalwarts like m.k Gandhi attempting
to create social awareness among the Indians of the time, te message failed to
reach the masses in letter and spitir it was later prime ministers who
attempted to make a few changes in the drive, but modi took it seriously as per
the reports. In one of the interviews, mr Kovind (14th president of the Republic of India) said, “It
has been highlighted several times that he is the first prime minister to talk
about building toilets from the ramparts of the Red Fort. No prime minister has
spoken about it [3].”
After successfully creating a
drive, we have earned the status of being an ODF
society on 2 October 2019 [4],
and apart from creating headlines, very few exercises/ studies were done to
analyse its positive and negative outcomes of the mission.
Positive Effects On The Sc/St
Community Of India
While it is ignored how the
mission has changed the face of the lower strata of the society in India, the
sc/ST and Dalits are the most benefited. Earlier to the making of toilets or ijjat
ghar as they are called today, after the intervention of Indian authorities
and socialists to give a respectful way to call it what it is. The women were
forced to go out in the open and they had to finish their business before the
sun comes up, in the dark, the movie toilet ek prem katha highlights this
problem beautifully where the women who sit along the road side face
humiliation when a vehicle passes by and the ongoers later comment
disrespectfully indicating that they have seen some indescribable parts of a
stranger women.
While the movie has attempted to
show a very sanitized version of what happens in the far-flung parts of rural
India, there is something more grotesque that happens. Women who goes to attend
natures call are either raped/killed or harassed more so if they do not hold
land where they can defecate in open, most of the times they have to rely upon
the lands of larger land owners. When the land owners find this, they are
furious for some reason, and these feuds most often take a very dirty turn of
events[5]
[6].
The women were either killed/raped by men who owned the land or the powerful
men r they were killed by animals who were looking for an easy prey.
While these incidents were common
before there was Swachh Bharat Mission, the sufferer was always a woman from
the lower strata of society who was economically weak and was financially
deprived. The class that was the biggest beneficiary of the Ijjat Ghar has been women of rural India.
These incidents remind me of the
story which is illustrated in the Abrahamic religion, where women were
subjected to similar cruelty by men who, in the dark, wait for their opportune time, ty
just like a wild animal sits in the bushes.
Ending the manual scavenging
menace
While the whole focus of the
campaigning for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was giving respect to women, the class that immensely benefited was the Dalits, who manually cleaned the toilets
in rural India; their work has been reduced. In a way, we can say that the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act,
2013, has finally started to get implemented at least in
rural India, the government has made mechanical arrangements to clean the defecation.
When the pits are filled, a septic tank comes to clear the pits and dispose of the waste.
While the world says that odf
declaration has yet failed to give the status of free from manual scavenging the
ms act of 2013 has failed to deliver the promise made by the govt of india, but
I differ the NAMASTE scheme National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem
was launched for the upliftment and making alternative arrangement for the
cleaning of sewage treatment. So the scheme has made amendments and pivoted
itself to achieve greater causes, which can be read in the PDF linked about.
The problem with the sanitation is
double fold one is the real problem and the other is the civic sense of the Indians
which is where the govt needs to work more, even if we achieve the basic idea
to mechanize the whole sanitation process the attitude and behavioural issue of
the mass population will lead to clogs which may or may not need the human
intervention.
criticism
while there are good things about
the SBM there are some bad as well, the independent organisations have said
that despite the attempts of govt the SBM has failed to eradicate the practice
of manual scavenging to a large extend as the data says that there are 1093
death in last decade alone due to manual scavenging [7].
It is also said that the NAMASTE scheme
only works when the govt has a fixed data of the number or workers working on
the ground, and the data is unavailable as of now, if it is true its sad as no
one in free India must be send to a gas chamber to die even if he is willing to
do so. An old Quint video featuring Samdhish explains the problem very well
[8].
Another criticism of the SBM is
that the government has failed to instill the feeling of responsible behaviour in the
people of India or the Indian society, which could translate to better success
of the SBM in later years. A survey done in Jaipur about the SBM has shown a
clear image of the mission [9]
100 of % people who took the survey
were not aware of the Swachchhta Hi Seva activity, which instilled responsible
behaviour, and 100 of % people did not know about the segregation of wet and dry
waste. While it is declared in the survey that it was done on subjects who
are educated till primary and have been residing in the area for more than 5
years, they have seen the landscape changing and changes happening. The SBM has
helped people, but has failed to change the behavioural attitude among the
masses wh which could give a better result.lt
The
govt has also failed to generate enough awareness among the people to use the sewage
waste once it is dry to use as manure in the fields or sell it as it can be
pure god for farming, both organic cheap, the report by the Indian express has
also pointed towards the issue that the all the toilets made are not constructed
following the twin pit system of honeycomb design [10],
which is said to be designed to treat the sewage properly without
contaminating the land and creating high grade manure in less than 6 months.
There can be no qualms about the
positive effects of SBM in Indian socially and its dividends will be reaped for
the next generations to come, but we also need to address the situation which can
arise with improperly handing of the sewage that will be generated in rural and
urban India, failing to handle the situation properly, it may create a bigger
monster than the non odf state India
was. India has come a long way already, but we need to do many more things right
to give its citizens a better quality of life they deserve
[1] “Towards a Swachh
Bharat | Prime Minister of India,” accessed May 12, 2024,
https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/government_tr_rec/swachh-bharat-abhiyan-2/.
[2] “International
Decade for Action ‘Water for Life’ 2005-2015. Focus Areas: The Human Right to
Water and Sanitation,” accessed May 12, 2024,
https://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/human_right_to_water.shtml.
[3] “No Other PM Spoke
about Building Toilets from Ramparts of Red Fort: Ram Nath Kovind,” accessed
May 12, 2024,
https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/no-other-prime-minister-has-spoken-about-building-toilets-from-ramparts-of-red-fort-former-president-ram-nath-kovind/cid/1926733.
[4] “Modi Declares India
ODF,” accessed May 12, 2024,
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/rural-water-and-sanitation/modi-declares-india-odf-67065.
[5] “Girl Goes out to
Answer Nature’s Call, Found Dead,” The Times of India, June 27, 2017,
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/girl-goes-out-to-answer-natures-call-found-dead/articleshow/59335397.cms.
[6] “Girl Goes out to
Answer Nature’s Call, Found Dead.”
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burqa#cite_note-siddiqui-40:~:text=God%20is%20forgiving%20and%20kind,confused%20them%20with%20slave%20girls.
[7] Sadhika Tiwari, IndiaSpend, “Indian Government Has Built 95 Million Toilets, but Little Has
Changed for Manual Scavengers,” Scroll, December 14, 2019,
https://scroll.in/article/946746/indian-government-has-built-95-million-toilets-but-little-has-changed-for-manual-scavengers.
[8] Why Manual
Scavenging Still Persists 30 Years After Its Ban in India, Activists Explain |
The Quint, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCVGfmV1BXk.
[9] Shweta Mathur, “A
SURVEY ON IMPACT OF SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN ON SLUM AREA IN JAIPUR CITY,” April
1, 2019.
[10] “Not Just
Sanitation, but Climate-Proof Sanitation,” The Indian Express (blog),
November 21, 2023,
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/g20-summit-swachh-bharat-mission-jal-jeevan-missionsclimate-change-india-g20-presidency-9035316/.
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