Giving Compass' Take:

• C S Sharada Prasad and Isha Ray follow the daily lives of sanitation workers in urban India who provide essential services for communities. 

• How can funders work to address India's sanitation structure issues at scale? 

• Learn more about barriers to urban sanitation. 

India’s flagship sanitation programme, Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), highlights the importance of both latrine use, and ‘safe and proper disposal’. Since most of urban India is not connected to sewers, the SBM recommends that cities work towards technological, financing, and governance initiatives that would ensure safe faecal sludge management. In practice, this refers to mechanical (that is, truck-and-hose) sludge removal as opposed to the now-illegal manual method of emptying toilet pits.

But, how do cleaners live and work; what do their days and nights demand of them; and to what extent does their work rely on India’s age-old caste system on which SBM policies are silent? What, in other words, does the ‘back-end’ of Swachh Bharat look like in an Indian city?

It is a typical December day in the lives of Deepak, Rajesh, and Prabhu. They empty out septic tanks and soak pits for homes and businesses. They are all from the Madiga (Dalit) community. They have been at this job for three to five years. Deepak is driving a yellow Tata 909 truck fitted with a large cylindrical tank at the back. The men are going to a home in a middle-class neighbourhood, where the toilet has backed up because the pit is full.

When the truck reaches the destination, Rajesh and Prabhu jump out and try to locate the pit; it is covered by a concrete slab and is under a foot of soil. They find the slab and pry it open to insert the hose. The other end of the hose is attached to a vacuum pump. On Prabhu’s signal, Deepak starts the truck engine, that gets the pump started. In a few minutes, the pit is empty. Prabhu and Rajesh work quickly to coil the hose back on the hook attached to the tank.

Read the full article about sanitation workers in urban India by C S Sharada Prasad and Isha Ray at India Development Review.