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Manual Scavenging: an ongoing problem in India

Manual scavenging refers to the practice of manually cleaning, carrying, disposing or handling in any

manner, human excreta from dry latrines and sewers. It is a caste-based occupation and the vast majority of workers involved are women. This practice was banned with the passing of the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act 1993 and with the Prohibition of Employment As Manual Scavengers & their Rehabilitation Act 2013, but it continues to find practitioners. The occupation persists mainly because of the continued presence of insanitary latrines.There are about 2.6 million insanitary latrines (dry toilets) that require cleaning by hand.This dehumanizing practice is prevalent across many indian states, and it is done by people who fall lowest in the caste hierarchy. Not only is this practice humiliating but also a major cause of

discrimination.

Manual scavenging exists in many forms:

- Dry latrines, the oldest and most common form. Workers gather the waste manually, then carry it out of the house in baskets and dispose it outside the village. 98% of these workers are women.

Community Dry latrines (big structure used collectively by people) and Individual Dry Latrines (present at individual houses) are estimated to be 2,600,000 all over the country. According to the House Listing and Housing Census 2011, states such as Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra,Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal account for more than 72% of the insanitary latrines in India.

- Railway track scavenging, the biggest violator of the law in India is the Indian Railways (the ministry continues to deny the practice of manual scavenging) where many train carriages have toilets dropping the excreta from trains on the tracks and who employ scavengers to clean the tracks manually. There are about 8,025 railway stations in the country which ferry about 23,000,000 passengers everyday and an estimated number of 36,176 railway cleaners.

- Cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, prevalent in urban areas. Workers gather the sewage with bare

hands, sometimes while neck deep in sewage. Many people die every year by inhaling poisonous gases.With an estimated number of 770,000 sewer cleaners the average of reported deaths is around 600 every year.Manual scavengers are at a double disadvantage. They are members of lower castes and as such, face enormous discrimination in society, and second, are disadvantaged because they are manual scavengers who clean human excreta. The challenge of rehabilitation is urgent, and requires a comprehensive approach that moves beyond expanding income generation or providing loans, to focus on various aspects crucial to secure the future of the next generation of liberated manual scavengers. Manual scavenging is not only a caste-based but also a gender-based occupation with 90% of them being women. 

Households with dry latrines prefer women to clean the excreta instead of men as they are located inside the house.According to a Human Rights Watch report, on an average, women get paid as little as between Rs 10 and Rs 50 every month per household. It is much less than men who earn up to Rs 300 a day for cleaning sewer lines.There have been various efforts by the government, civil society organizations, and the foreign donor community to end manual scavenging. However there are significant barriers to achieving lasting change.Overcoming them requires a serious commitment from the government to ensure adequate programs are in place and to hold officials at all levels accountable for implementing laws and policies aimed at ending manual scavenging.

Legislative attempts to end manual scavenging have been accompanied by administrative programs,

referred to as schemes, and policies directed at converting India’s sanitation system and at helping

communities engaged in manual scavenging seek alternate livelihoods. The responsibility for

implementing these schemes and policies rests with a number of different government departments,

which often do not coordinate their efforts. The Government of India has adopted a two-pronged

strategy of eliminating insanitary latrines through demolition and conversion into sanitary latrines, and developing a comprehensive rehabilitation package for manual scavengers through a survey. 

However,while manual scavenging for many may have ended as a form of employment, the stigma and discrimination associated with it lingers on, making it difficult for former or liberated manual scavengers to secure alternate livelihoods and raising the fear that people could once again return to manual scavenging in the absence of other opportunities to support their families.

In contrast to government failure, the success of civil society organizations in empowering individuals to leave manual scavenging confirms that, with directed effort, it is possible to end the practice. Without effective government programs, civil society and community based organizations are working to generate livelihoods for individuals who leave manual scavenging. For instance, they have piloted gender and market sensitive vocational training. According to Bezwada Wilson, founder of Safai Karmachari Andolan (a movement for elimination of manual scavenging), the Indian government has responded positively to these initiatives by engaging in serious dialogue with civil society organizations. These efforts offer strategies and good practices to translate India’s legislative commitments into effective action at the local level.Various United Nations agencies and international human rights bodies have also addressed manual scavenging: 

UNICEF has approached manual scavenging as a water and sanitation issue; the World

Health Organization (WHO) has taken up manual scavenging as a health issue; UNDP has a special task force on the issue of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; UN Women addresses manual scavenging based upon that fact that 95 percent of manual scavengers who clean dry toilets and open defecation are women; and the ILO focuses on ending manual scavenging by supporting implementation of relevant government policies in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. On January 31, 2013, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Navi Pillay, appealed to the Indian government to take action to end manual scavenging.

Government, civil society organizations, and the foreign donors intervention is needed to end caste based labor designations that bind women and men to manual scavenging. To overcome the entrenched obstacles discussed above, individuals need immediate access to alternate livelihoods and housing, and an effective response when they face threats of violence.

HEEALS (Health, Education, Environment And Livelihood Society) is one of those organizations

directly involved in facing manual scavenging problem. It is working on Water Sanitation and Toilet

Building projects in seven states: Delhi (National Capital Region), Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal,

Uttranchal, Leh and Uttar Pradesh. HEEALS works in marginalized communities, slum schools, schools in unauthorised colonies, orphanages and refugee camps. Through spreading education on Water,Sanitation and Hygiene, organizing workshop against Manual Scavenging and building clean and safe toilets, HEEALS is working to increase the attendance rates of pupils in schools who leave their studies to work as manual scavengers, reduce the number of diseases and deaths and improve the health of people across Indian society.

- Manuel
WASH Intern


References:
Human Rights Watch interview with Bezwada Wilson, national convener of Safai Karmachari Andolan,Delhi, December 13, 2013.
United Nations Development Programme and UN Solution Exchange (Gender Community of Practice),
“Report of National Round Table Discussion on Social Inclusion of Manual Scavengers,” December 21,2012.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/manual-scavenging-a-stinking-legacy-of-suffocation-andstigma-
61586
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_scavenging
http://www.hrw.org
http://in.one.un.org/page/breaking-free-rehabilitating-manual-scavengers/
https://www.safaikarmachariandolan.org
http://southasia.oneworld.net/features/manual-scavengers-indian-railways-in-denial#.XHjD7a1aa1t
http://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/pub-povertyreduction/Social-inclusion-of-Manual-
Scavengers.pdf

Please Support Our Fundraising Program For Girls !

Self-Defense And Self-Confidence Program

Please Click To Help and Support Our Fundraising Campaign .

We would like to start a self-defence and self-confidence program for students of schools in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana states. As regards girls, the self-defence program will contribute in their lack of confidence during their periods: their phisical weekeness will be conpensated by acquistion of new skills. Moreover,
parents will be more confident and they will feel more secure about their daughters. This will lead to an increment of girls’ enrollment in schools. Self-discipline hints will help out boys boys and girls to be positive and to be more aware on how they can protect themselves.

Goals:
- This program will provide children with confidence, raising their enrollment in school and being more aware on how to protect themselves.
- Students will get different self-protection tips on how to avoid/ defend by potential attackers througout the use of objects or by striking on the soft spots of the attacker, when ubjected to physical abuse, violence, crime, etc.
- Students will have the chance to see the live demo of self-defence techniques as demonstrated by the trainer
- Provide knowledge about the different tips of self-protection to keep in mind in different situations

End open air defecation in India

End open air defecation in India According to UNICEF: “Open defecation refers to the practice whereby people go out in fields, bushes, forests, open bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than using the toilet to defecate”. Open defecation represents a serious threat to the health of people (especially children) in India, where the estimated percentage of population practicing open defecation is around 40% (WHO/ UNICEF 2017 data). Open defecation was found by the WHO in 2014 to be a leading cause of diarrheal death. It is also an important factor that causes various diseases such as diarrhea, intestinal worm infections, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid and others. It can lead to environment and water pollution when rain flushes feces that are dispersed in the environment into surface water or unprotected wells. There are strong gender impacts connected with this practice: the lack of safe, private toilets makes women and girls vulnerable to violence and is an impediment to girls' education. Women are at risk of sexual molestation and rape as they search for places for open defecation that are secluded and private, often during hours of darkness.

The international commitment to end open air defecation worldwide is underlined in the SDG 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development set by the United Nations. Goal 6 states: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” and its target 6.2 asserts: “By 2030 achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations”. The data highlight how far we have come since 2000. Open defecation rates have fallen and billions have gained access to basic water and sanitation services. Despite these successes, progress has been uneven in both areas, with wide disparities among and within countries. Although the data show a great improvement, around 892 million people worldwide continue to lack even the most rudimentary sanitation and still practice open air defecation.

In October 2014, the Prime Minister of India launched an ambitious national sanitation program that aims to eliminate open defecation by 2019. The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) has unprecedented political support and has mobilized nearly $25 billion from Government, the private sector and civil society. The program targets behaviour change and community approaches to sanitation are being adopted throughout the country. The SBM has developed a national database with detailed information on latrine coverage down to the household level and a multi-stage verification process. As of June 2017, according to the SBM, over 205,000 villages, 149 districts and five States had reported themselves to be open defecation free.

The Government estimated that since the start of the Mission, in October 2014, coverage of latrines in rural India has increased from 42% to 65%, and the number of rural Indians defecating in the open had come down from 550 to 330 million people by June 2017. The SBM program recognizes the need to go beyond reporting infrastructure coverage, and is conducting population-based surveys to determine household use of sanitation facilities, which is the internationally agreed-upon indicator used by JMP (WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene) to compare progress across countries. Within the governmental program a joint initiative organized by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and UNICEF aims to increase the capacity of local and national actors working in WASH in schools. The world has made steady progress: the proportion of the global population practising open defecation decreased from 20% to 12% between 2000 and 2015. But much remains to be done, especially in rural areas, where open defecation has been declining at a rate of just 0.7 percentage points per year. This rate would need to more than double in order to eliminate open defecation in rural areas by 2030.

HEEALS (Health, Education, Environment And Livelihood Society) is one of those organizations directly involved in facing and solving open air defecation problem. It is working on Water Sanitation, Menstrual Hygiene and Toilet Building projects in seven states: Delhi (National Capital Region), Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal, Uttranchal, Leh and Uttar Pradesh. HEEALS works in slum schools, schools in unauthorised colonies, orphanages and refugee camps. Through spreading education on Sanitation, Menstrual Hygiene and building clean safe, toilets HEEALS is working to increase the attendance rates of pupils in schools, reduce the number of diseases and deaths and improve the health of people across Indian society.


Manuel Mezzadra WASH intern





References: Diarrhoeal diseases, WHO, 10th march 2014 Fear and anger: Perceptions of risks related to sexual violence against women linked to water and sanitation in Delhi, India - Briefing Note. SHARE (Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity) and WaterAid, UK, Lennon, S. (2011). Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, 2017 updates and SDG baselines. WHO/ UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation Violence, Gender & WASH: A Practitioner’s Toolkit – Making water, sanitation and hygiene safer through improved programming and services, House, Sarah, Suzanne Ferron, Marni Sommer and Sue Cavill (2014). Webography: http://heeals.org https://heeals.blogspot.com http://unicef.in/whatwedo/11/eliminate-open-defecation https://washdata.org/reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_defecation#Impacts -

ON THE WAY TO AN OPEN FIELD. The rape risk for women for open defecation.

On the night of 27th of May, in Katra Sahadatganj, two girls said to their parents they’d have left home for toilet. The girls were found hanged from a tree the following hours. From a first investigation, the girls have been raped, killed and then hanged to make it looks like a suicide. Unfortunately, as many cases like this, it turned in suicide leaving the culprits free. This is not an isolated case, especially in the villages, women who have to find an open field to defecate or only to cleanse themselves are many and they usually doing this under the cover of night, far from the village eyes. Many women say to prefer to wake up before down and think it is better doing with someone else like a female friend or relative, never alone. They know that men lurk, watch and worse. “Try to squat in a sari, while holding a cup of water to cleanse themselves and keeping an eye out for rapists” wrote Rose George for HuffPost. According to a 2015 UNICEF/WHO report, this is what about 300 million women and girls in India have to face every day because they have no access to toilets. A WaterAid, DFID-funded Sanitation and HARE study, explains that in the slums people have to share public toilets and girls under the age of 10 reported to face a higher risk to be raped on the way to reach the public toilets. In many interviews conducted by researchers, women from villages and slums narrate the high frequency of cases of assaults. In any case, women always faced lewd remarks, physical gestures and rape when they hide in the bush. Particularly, a mother said she had to fight with a group of delinquents for protecting her daughters from getting raped. She knew that or they kill her to rape her daughters or they back off. The frequency of this assaults is chilling.

Nearly half the world’s population lacks access to improved sanitation conditions and half of them reside in India, where almost half a billion people defecate in the open. The lack of adequate sanitary facilities lead women to an increased exposure to the risk of gang rape and lynching. This is one of the reasons why open defecation have to be stopped, in addition to diseases caused by faecal contamination. Indeed, according to the recent UNICEF survey, 102 813 children in India died, in the 2016, due to diarrhoea. No country in the world has more open defecation than India, where one in two people defecate outside. Although open defecation has been reduced by 31 percent since 1990, about 300 million women and girls in India still have no other choice.

The improvement of toilet infrastructures in the villages is a target for the decrease of women sexual violence for open defecation, providing them some level of protection. According to Approva Jadhav, a US researcher, the non-partner violence is a type of sexual violence closely linked to open defecation places. The research results suggest that women who use open defecation have twice the odds of non-partner sexual violence (NPSV) than women who use household toilets. So, it is necessary to improve infrastructures to provide women with some level of protection against NPSV.

However, the building of infrastructures for sanitation purposes has to face an important challenge regarding the changing of people behaviour. According to a study, at least 50 per cent of structures built for sanitation purposes in India remains unused or is used for other purposes. According to some critics, this is due to the fact that imposing an infrastructure never used before without a direct request from the population, leads to a psychological rejection in front of the change in their habits. The change of behaviour can be done only by a demand driven by the population. For example, it is known a movement called "No loo, No I do", through which brides refuse to get married into families which live in homes without toilet. This can be useful for rousing the population mind.

India is running far behind to attain its sanitation goals and the situation is getting difficult with each passing year. The researchers strongly recommends infrastructure improvements that can provide women with some level of protection against sexual violence, along with behaviour changes to utilise these built toilet facilities.

Currently, many campaigns and NGO’s action, like HEEALS committed in the UN’s WASH project,  and the Indian government are underway to raise awareness of the use of toilets and to stop open defecation, involving the aim in the national conversation and following the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 for sanitation and hygiene. This is an important need that population can’t avoid anymore, because it regards public health and safety but also human dignity.

Elisa Stucchi-

WASH & MH Coordinator 

People Voices To Save Girl Child & Educate Girl Child In India

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CLOSE LINKS BETWEEN A BALANCED DIET AND MENSTRUAL HYGIENE

The strength of the relationship between a correct nutrition and a healthy

menstrual condition is often undervalued and unknown. Sometimes, in fact,

the consequences of malnutrition are pervasive and massive but also hidden.

This is why the malnutrition, specially concerning under nutrition, represents

a global challenge that requires both social and economic efforts.

Malnutrition can be seen as an outcome of bad interaction between different

agents, such as: agricultural food system, environment, health system, and

the individual-household decision making process. It is fundamental that in an

enabling environment, completed with specific intervention and programmes,

woman are allowed to have access to safe food, social safety nets, physical

and mental care, health and family planning services and water sanitation.

Moreover, all those factors contributes to the empowerment of women,

increasing their acknowledge and consciousness about nutrition and hygienic

issues.

A big role in women's empowerment is played by agriculture. In fact,

agriculture not only has effects on expenditures and consumption of food, but

also has a strong link with women's employment and their own nutrition and

health conditions. A problem related with agriculture, as findings shows, is

that farmers tend to sell more expensive and nourishing products, retaining

less expensive cereals for domestic consumption. This is why is necessary to

support an environmentally sustainable food production that includes a

diversification of products, allowing the availability of nutrient-dense foods

and small-scale livestock.

Speaking more particularly about woman’s health, we should consider the

age group between 15 and 25 years old, the younger women group among

whom fertility is more concentrated, who face the largest disadvantage in

India. This is considered a problem especially in relation to the pre-pregnant

underweight condition in India, in fact scholars affirms that approximately

42.2% of pre-pregnant women have their Body Mass Index (BMI) under

18.5kg/m2, this means that a strong percentage of Indian women before

pregnancy suffers from underweight and malnutrition.

But how this reflects on women's life? First of all, it has implication in work

capacity and productivity, regardless the work they carry out. It means that in

a work environment women in this condition may be considered less

productive. Another reflection implicates the social-physical and cognitive

sphere. Good nourishment allows developing all spheres in the most

appropriate way, in order to improve individual benefit. Finally, a very

important reflection of nourishment in women's life is related to the fetal and

child nutrition and development. An improvement of consciousness and

awareness in this field not only helps to ameliorate maternal healthcare and

safety, but also may largely reduce mortality in childhood and child's

undernourishment. In this sense, an improvement may have great reflection

on new generations learning capacity, improving the whole society.

But what does balanced diet means? A balanced diet is a correct

consumption of a large variety of food, which means that is appropriate to

consume a right quantity of various nutritious daily. An inappropriate diet may

cause healthy problems such as micronutrient deficiency, like a lack of

important vitamins and minerals, generating various types of symptoms.

In conclusion, all those evidences bring us to consider how much important

are good and healthy diet habits, balancing correctly all nourishments, in

order to ameliorate woman’s health and lifestyle.

-Grandoni Laura