The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the country-wide campaign to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management in India, must focus on the invisible sanitation worker, Prof. Lyla Mehta (Institute of Development Studies, UK and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences) and Hariprasad V M (doctoral candidate at IIT Bombay) write in The Indian Express.
«Sanitation is a human right, a public good and critical for health and productivity. It is also one of the most off-track Sustainable Development Goals, with 43 per cent of the world’s population lacking access to safe sanitation. In India, as in many parts of the Global South, centralised and capital-intensive sanitation and waste management systems are largely restricted to the mega-cities with towns and smaller cities disconnected from networked treatment plants and sewage systems. This makes safely managed sanitation and waste management in urban areas one of India’s most compelling challenges.»
