Easy Access to Sanitation

Hey everyone!

I’m bringing something to the table that I didn’t really think about before I began to do my research on the health of the urban poor living in slums; toilets. Yes, toilets, a commodity that most of us have; if not one, sometimes two or more of them in our very home. Let me back track a little bit. My interest in slums comes from my interest in how the public’s health is affected by their surroundings of where they live; whether it be the infrastructure and resources that surround them or lack of it. The most common topics I touch on are the malnutrition or obesity dilemmas of the urban poor due to the absence of better nutritional resources based on where they live. Access to clean water, hygiene, and pollution are among also very important issue to me. But never had I really thought about to what extent, the urban poor living in slums, had to do when dealing with their own excreta.

Many of us can imagine what one must do in absence of a toilet; find a quiet place, far from anyone that can see you and take care of business. That is not even an option for many without toilets in slums near the railroad tracks just a few miles from a New Delhi five start hotel. The railroad tracks are indeed their toilets. Habitants here get up before the sun rises and head to the tracks to do what we all humans do in the dark to eliminate their visibility. Many claim to say it is very embarrassing, especially for women.  

Along those lines of humiliation, I learn about Manual Scavengers. Scavenging is the practice of manual cleaning of human excreta from service latrines. They crawl into the latrines and clean them out with their bare hands. This is a living that is passed down from generation, not giving the people born into this “hereditary profession” a chance to escape it, becoming the most hated and avoided people in the community also known as the untouchables.  A lot of the times, it is woman who performs this task, moving the excreta from the latrines on a basket on their heads to dispose of it elsewhere leaving room for others to continue to squat, perform, and walk away.

Knowing about issues like this, gives an opportunity to find solutions. That is what the non-profit organization, Sulabh International Social Services has achieved. SISS, protect scavengers from social discrimination and help eliminate the burden of having to perform their corporal necessities in the dark, sometimes risking mosquito attacks and more severely, sexual abuse. SISS has created the two pit pour-flush toilets which are socially acceptable, affordable to make, and functional. These toilets, known as Sulabh Shauchalaya- meaning “easy access to sanitation, have been implemented in over 1.2 million households throughout India and as many as 8000 in public areas.