C-EENRG Seminar: 'The Right to Sanitation in India: Multi-faceted Dimensions'

This is a seminar of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG). Feel free to bring your lunch.

Professor Philippe Cullet, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), will talk about 'The Right to Sanitation in India: Multi-faceted Dimensions'.

Abstract: The right to sanitation has been the object of fast increasing attention in India in recent years. This is reflected in the policy priority given to the Clean India Mission that aims, for instance, to end open defecation by 2019. In practice, most of the attention has been focused on building individual toilets to ensure the end of open defecation. This is a strategy that has been ongoing for several decades but that has been given much more significant policy impetus and resources since 2014. There is an essential link between sanitation and access to toilets. Yet, sanitation is also much more than access to individual toilets. It includes access to toilets in public areas, sufficient sewerage, wastewater and septage management, and rights of sanitation workers. The latter is particularly important in India where manual scavenging linked to untouchability (abolished by the Constitution) has still not been fully eradicated. Since manual scavenging is linked to dry latrines, this calls for introducing water-based sanitation. However, this needs to be linked with the need to ensure that no one is in direct contact with human faeces that calls for strict regulation of sanitation work in general. The law and policy for sanitation illustrates the complex issues surrounding sanitation.

While there has been tremendous change allowing for much more open discussion of sanitation in general, there remains various significant hurdles on the way to the realisation of everyone’s right to sanitation, as illustrated by measures that disqualify people without toilets at home from contesting local elections.