CURRENT AFFAIRS

Description

Sustainable Sanitation

Sanitation generally refers to principles, practices, provisions, or services related to cleanliness and hygiene in personal and public life for the protection and promotion of human health and well-being and breaking the cycle of disease or illness. It is also related to the principles and practices relating to the collection, treatment, removal or disposal of human excreta, household waste water and other pollutants.

Impact of poor Sanitation

·         Health-related impacts: Premature deaths, costs of treating diseases; productive time lost due to people falling ill, and time lost by caregivers who look after them.

·         Domestic water-related impacts: Household treatment of water; use of bottled water; a portion of costs of obtaining piped water; and time costs of fetching cleaner water from a distance.

·         Access time impacts: Cost of additional time spent for accessing shared toilets or open defecation sites; absence of children (mainly girls) from school and women from their workplaces.

·         Tourism impacts: Potential loss of tourism revenues and economic impacts of gastrointestinal illnesses among foreign tourists.

To meet the issue, government has launched Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM).

Achievements

·         In the past four years, India has built 100 million toilets in about 0.6 million villages and another 6.3 million in cities.

·         According to government estimates, by February 2019, over 93 per cent of the country’s rural households had access to toilets; over 96 per cent of them also used the toilets, suggesting an important change in behaviour.

However, the massive task now is to include people who still lack toilets, overcome partial toilet use, and retrofit toilets which are not yet sustainably safe.

Issues in maintaining sustainable sanitation

1.      Slippage to earlier practice: In Haryana, declared ODF in 2017, people were slipping back to the old habit of open defecation, this is when it had invested in changing the behaviour of people.

2.      Issue of excreta disposal:  According to NARSS 2018-19, roughly 34 per cent toilets are septic tanks with a soak pit; another 30 per cent are double leach pits, and another 20 per cent are single pits. It assumes that the toilet will safely decompose the excreta in-situ. However, this will depend completely on the quality of the construction of the toilets. Surveys by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in peri-urban India have found that the quality of septic tanks is poor; waste is unsafely disposed through tanker operators on the land, or worse, in waterbodies.

Hence to make the sanitation sustainable the first principle is to recognise that excreta and wastewater are not wastes, but resources that are valuable and can be reused and recycled.

The conventional design of toilets in India considers human excreta and urine as a waste and based on the premise that it should be disposed off, but by applying innovative technologies, proper recycling, and waste management it can turn as a valuable resource. 

Additionally, an enabling environment would need to be created through conducive policy support and reforms, leveraging technology for Mission implementation, robust and realtime, data-driven monitoring supported by third-party verifications, capacity building of municipal staff, and private sector participation.

The World Bank has also recommended following steps for maintaining sustainable sanition.

1. Increasing political will and administrative commitment by identifying and creating local sanitation champions at the district level – for example, through exposure visits and evidence-based advocacy – and addressing key institutional bottlenecks such by supporting the state to formulate a state-specific sanitation policy.
2. Providing technical support to selected districts to demonstrate that sanitation can be delivered at the scale of a district and in a sustainable manner, and to develop district-wide approaches that are tailored to a particular state.
3. Supporting the strengthening of state governments’ institutional capacity to roll out the successful models to other districts, eventually covering the entire state.

Conclusion

Sustainability of sanitation is a key challenge as well as a scope to improve sanitation facilities in India. The Government should use more technical tools, expertise to develop a sustainable framework of latrines, sewages across the country, and strengthening capacity and capability building. Sustainability is not only related to the physical part of the issue, it additionally covers the physiological aspects where the attitude, behavior, and cultural beliefs of the society should be changed and people should accept the improved mean of sanitation rather continuing the decade old practices.