When the pits fill up: (in)visible flows of waste in urban India

Abstract

India's flagship program on sanitation and hygiene – the Swachh Bharat Mission – aims to eliminate open defecation and to manage urban waste for a ‘Clean India’. The emptying of toilet pits and the transport of waste are as critical as more toilets are for sustainable sanitation. In unsewered cities of the global South, these services are mainly provided by privately run cleaning trucks. We find that the physical and social mechanisms through which these services are organized are virtually invisible in national fecal sludge and waste management policies. Based on a rich ethnography of cleaning trucks in Bangalore, India, we show that trucking operations dispose of sludge in ways that harm both public health and the environment, and that the caste composition of sanitation work helps to keep it invisible from officials and the public. We draw on the concept of the social role of disgust to explain the seen-and-unseen nature of these trucks. ‘Seeing’ sludge management as it is practiced is essential for understanding how the sanitary city is being produced and for the success of future sanitation reforms. This article has been made Open Access thanks to the generous support of a global network of libraries as part of the Knowledge Unlatched Select initiative.

Understanding Open Defecation in the Age of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: Agency, Accountability, and Anger in Rural Bihar

“…For example, though much of urban India remains unsewered [48], there are significant differences in the waste management technologies available in urban and rural areas. In Bihar, 61% of rural households do not have access to a wastewater system, compared to 29% of households in urban areas [49].…”

GIS-aided optimisation of faecal sludge management in developing countries: the case of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana

“…Moreover, minimising the FS transport distance helps to reduce the haulage cost, making the services more affordable to households and economically attractive to the vacuum truck operators. Various reports indicate that vacuum tanker operators may dispose of FS at inappropriate sites if the distance to the FTP is too long [5, 16, 68, 69, 70].…”

“…For example, in Dakar, Senegal, it costs households 50 USD to desludge 10 m 3 of FS [72], while in the peri-urban areas of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the cost ranges between USD 9.3 and USD 36.0 [46]; in Kisumu, Kenya, mechanical emptying costs averagely USD 52 [52]. Also, in urban India, house owners pay USD 25–30 per trip for FS collection and haulage [70].…”

“…Besides, poorer neighbourhoods must be given a priority in the delivery of such services. This approach will help reduce the likelihood of households engaging illegal emptiers who discharge FS into the environment [5, 16, 68, 69, 70].…”

Perception management of non-sewered sanitation systems towards scheduled faecal sludge emptying behaviour change intervention

“…Also, in Tanzania, households delayed emptying of toilets/latrines as long as possible, and then resorted to unsafe practices like 'flooding out' (Jenkins et al, 2015). Most of the sewage, faecal sludge and almost all of the septage generated by an average Indian city is disposed of untreated into open drains and peri-urban fields (Prasad and Ray, 2019).…”