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What Swachh Bharat Abhiyan ignores
Article:
- Ravichandran Bathranemphasized that the profession of waste removal needs to be made caste-neutral through adoption of technologies.
Important facts:
2. In India, waste carries the stigma that is attached to pollution and caste.
3. The waste remover in India is not a professional, like in the West.
4. PM Modi government announced his government’s agenda to accomplish the vision of a clean India by 2019.
5. According to PM, filthiness all around us, is an obstacle for promoting the tourism that offers jobs to the poorest of the poor.
6. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA):
- Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) was an unprecedented nationwide initiative aimed to inspire the public to voluntarily clean public spaces as a service to the nation.
7. Loopholes in Swachh Bharat campaign:
- The campaign hardly addresses a reworking of the underground sewerage system.
- This is a serious concern because many labourers have died recently while cleaning jammed manholes that open into the sewerage system.
- As per the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, over 300 cases of deaths due to manual scavenging, mostly from particular caste groups, were reported in 2017.
8. In India, waste carries the stigma that is attached to pollution and caste.
9. In Agraharams (exclusive Brahmin quarters), and even in some non-Brahmin households, for example, toilets are constructed behind the house so that the scavenger is ‘unseeable’.
10. Suggestions:
- According to the author, western approaches can be followed in India to remove waste systematically.
- For example, when Londoners experienced the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858, the government realised that it would need a holistic sewerage plan, which would become part of the London water infrastructure, to remove filth and treat waste from the river
- Punitive measures should exhort the public to learn where and how one should urinate, defecate and dispose of garbage.
