Business Of Cleanliness: 

Business Of Cleanliness: 

Brief overview

The article talks about:

• The Swachh Bharat Mission
• Challenge of disposing fecal waste
• Fecal Sludge Management as a solution; FSM advantages

Swachh Bharat Mission

• The Swachh Bharat Mission plans to achieve safe sanitation for all by 2019.
• The government has a clearly-defined progress path for achieving open defecation free cities and districts/villages.
• There is also a well-defined process, for the different phases of the mission, across the sanitation value chain — build, use, maintain and treat (BUMT).

Challenge of disposing fecal waste

• Nationally, we generate a staggering 1.7 million tonnes of fecal waste every day.
• There are no systems in place to safely dispose the bulk of this waste.
• Nearly 80 per cent of this sludge remains untreated and is dumped into drains, lakes or rivers, posing a serious threat to safe and healthy living.
• This poses grievous dangers of infection since the untreated sludge comes back into human contact through either the soil, or through untreated water contaminated with the bacteria and pathogen load of the dumped sludge.
• We lose nearly 1,000 children a day to poor sanitation.

Fecal Sludge Management

• FSM is successfully adopted by several countries in south-east Asia.
• FSM involves collecting, transporting and treating fecal sludge and septage from pit latrines, septic tanks or other onsite sanitation systems.
• This waste is then treated at septage treatment plants.
• It is a cost and time effective system.
• The waste is collected by private operators, who empty the sludge using vacu-trucks.
• Now these truck operators can be monitored through a simple GPS tracking process in order to ensure that they dump the waste at treatment plants/pre-determined sites.
• The FSM ecosystem requires its stakeholders- government, private vacu-truck operators and citizens- to collaborate closely.

Advantages of FSM

• The most significant benefit that improved sanitation is improved public health.
• Cleaner water bodies mean reduced incidence of water-borne diseases and reduced mortality linked to diarrhoeal diseases — especially among children less than five years old.
• There is a huge potential in the FSM system businesses for sanitation workers.

The sludge is nutrient-rich. The waste, after treatment, can be:

• Used by farmers as organic compost
• treated and used for biogas, or to manufacture fuel pellets or ethanol
• used for irrigation
• used for construction
• used in cooling plants
• used by housing societies for gardens and flushing
• used by government agencies for parks.
• With appropriate training, sanitation workers can be empowered to own and run FSM businesses — much like the producer cooperatives of the agriculture sector.

Way Forward

• Effective sanitation measures like FSM are critical in saving these lives.
• A national policy is in place; it is now incumbent on cities and state governments to operationalise it.
• FSM is not only an engineering or infrastructure solution, but a city system that requires the resolve of each stakeholder to make the city fecal sludge free, and meet the objective of clean cities, as envisioned in the Swachh Bharat Mission.