Sanitation in India

ADB, the best regional development bank for water and sanitation, has published a couple of excellent reports this year on sanitation in India: India’s Sanitation for All: How to Make It Happen and, just the other day, Sanitation in India: Progress, Differentials, Correlates, and Challenges. The second section of the first report is “Sanitation in India: How Bad is It?” and here’s a quote:

However, while India may be “on track” in achieving the MDG sanitation target, it is important not to be complacent. MDG goals simply represent achievable levels if countries commit the resources and power to accomplish them. They do not necessarily represent acceptable levels of service.
This is especially true for India’s sanitation situation. Despite recent progress, access to improved sanitation remains far lower in India compared to many other countries with similar, or even lower, per capita gross domestic product. Bangladesh, Mauritania, Mongolia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Viet Nam − all with a lower gross domestic product per capita than India − are just a few of the countries that achieved higher access to improved sanitation in 2006.
An estimated 55% of all Indians, or close to 600 million people, still do not have access to any kind of toilet. Among those who make up this shocking total, Indians who live in urban slums and rural environments are affected the most.
In rural areas, the scale of the problem is particularly daunting, as 74% of the rural population still defecates in the open. In these environments, cash income is very low and the idea of building a facility for defecation in or near the house may not seem natural. And where facilities exist, they are often inadequate. The sanitation landscape in India is still littered with 13 million unsanitary bucket latrines, which require scavengers to conduct house-to-house excreta collection. Over 700,000 Indians still make their living this way.

The second report has some pertinent figures: if you’re rich you’re OK, but if you’re poor you’re not – as shown in the following two charts (prepared from Table 1 in the report).



The report estimates that US$ 7.9 billion is needed to provide toilets for all households that currently lack toilets in India (US$ 4.7 billion for rural areas and US$ 3.2 billion for urban areas). The report goes on to say that it would cost about U$ 7.7 billion to connect all currently unconnected urban households to sewer systems (but the report doesn’t mention simplified/condominial sewerage, so this is likely to be an overestimate). “Since these financing requirements are so huge”, the report suggests “progressive improvement in the types of sanitation solutions. Sewerage systems tend to benefit richer households; hence, some form of capital cost recovery could be considered to finance sewerage-related infrastructure.” I should think so (and it should be “should” not “could”): the rich shouldn’t get subsidised sewerage when so many have no sanitation at all.

All in all, both reports are definite “must reads”. Well done, ADB!

Africa’s infrastructure

The World Bank has just published online its 2010 report Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation. The current situation is really very depressing but the report is wholly realistic about the need for Transformation and how it might be achieved. The chapters on water supply and sanitation are well worth reading, as are the 2008 water supply and sanitation background papers. The 2008 report Cost Recovery, Equity, and Efficiency in Water Tariffs: Evidence from African Utilities is also very good.

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PS: Today is International Anticorruption Day.
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IWA Mexico: Plenary addresses

The presentations given at the plenary sessions of the first IWA Development Congress (Mexico City, 15−19 November – see blog of 19 November) are now online here. The two I found most interesting are those by Professor John Briscoe and Professor Jamie Bartram – both well worth looking at.

South Africa!

No comment!

India’s Greatest Shame

The December issue of IRC’s excellent Source Bulletin draws our attention yet again to India’s Greatest Shame with its article The Worst Job in the World − here’s a quote:

About 1.3 million Indians are still trapped in the degrading and dangerous job of manual scavenging of human excreta sixteen long years after the country passed a law to make the health threatening job illegal. Even in modern India, manual scavengers are still working to clean what Wilson Bezwada of Safai Karmachari Andolan calls “shit from the pit” of people who then discriminate and look down on the scavengers.

Watch the video The Worst Job in the World − also well worth watching is The Scavengers − India.

It’s all just a Total Disgrace. India, especially the Government of India and all the State Governments, should be truly ashamed of this unbelievably awful practice of manual scavenging. Just read this (also from Source Bulletin #58):

Without any protective clothing such as boots, masks or gloves, manual scavengers, clean toilets and clogged sewer lines. They collect the faecal matter into baskets lined with leaves, an activity which leaves many sick. About 80 per cent of these workers are women, the majority of them are Dalits. They are paid a paltry 900 rupees (15 Euro) a month and can afford only cheap drugs to treat their illnesses. [INR 900 = EUR 12.88 = USD 19.320 = GBP 11.70 − today’s rates from Oanda]

Safai Karmachari Andolan has a three-year programme to eradicate manual scavenging by the end of 2010, called Action 2010. We should all do what we can to support this, and this “we” includes all Indians, the Government of India and all State Governments.

Sanitation in emergency camps

Dominique Porteaud, UNHCR’s senior water and sanitation officer, was interviewed on World Toilet Day (19 November) about his work (interview here). When asked what happens if no latrines are installed, he replied:

A good example is Goma in 1994 [see here], when a million people crossed the border and, I think, about 50,000 people died because there was no proper sanitation and water supply. One of the major problems in Goma was that it was impossible to dig latrines because the [volcanic rock] ground was so hard and all the waste was spread around and contaminated the water that people were drinking. As a result, there was cholera everywhere.

So, what can you do if you can’t dig pits? It has to be an above-ground solution, such as eThekwini latrines − urine-diverting alternating twin-vault ventilated improved vault latrines (UD-VIVs, for short). But you don’t actually need twin vaults in emergency camps − a single-vault UD-VIV is fine; and in the initial aftermath of an emergency you can do without vent pipes. Urine diversion is needed to keep the vault contents as dry as possible and, of course, it can be used to fertilize food crops. So, what’s needed is a urine-diverting single-vault latrine, but the vault has to be pretty big. Many years ago Oxfam developed a big butyl-rubber septic tank to receive both faeces and urine from a multi-compartment latrine block (designed specifically for emergencies − the packing case became the superstructure), so something like this is what’s needed, but with each compartment discharging directly into the butyl-rubber tank (no flush water) and with urine diversion into a second butyl-rubber tank. Anyway, it’s worth thinking about.

Instituto Cinara

Cinara is the Instituto de Investigación y Desarrollo en Abastecimiento de Agua, Saneamiento Ambiental y Conservación del Recurso Hídrico (Research and Development Institute in Water Supply, Environmental Sanitation and Water Resources Conservation) in the Faculty of Engineering at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia. I’ve been a visiting professor here since 1996, but today was the first day I was interviewed (by Professor Mariela García) on what I thought was good (and bad) about Cinara. Well, I said, Cinara’s excellent because its staff are very enthusiastic and highly motivated and because they train engineers in low-cost water supply and sanitation for the poor, there aren’t enough institutes like Cinara in the world, and the world needs engineers properly trained in low-cost water supplies and sanitation for the poor − and lots of them. One of the other questions was: ‘Why are there institutes of development studies in industrialized countries but not in developing countries?’, and I said that, because the remit of IDSs is much broader than WatSan for the poor, they tend to be overpopulated with sociologists, anthropologists, planners, economists, etc. but underpopulated with engineers − people who can actually do something about providing the poor with low-cost water supplies and sanitation . Of course, these other professionals have a role, an important role, to play in WatSan for the poor (John Kalbermatten taught us this in the 1970s − see here), but you have to have engineers. As Jamie Bartram says: “Infrastructure? Yes please, and lots of it”. And who gives you Infrastructure? Engineers, that’s who.