Author: cprindia

Listen to the 30th episode of the CPR podcast, ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Mukta Naik, Fellow, CPR and Gregory Randolph, Executive Vice President, JustJobs Network, discussing their research on the role of small cities in shaping youth employment in India and Indonesia.

Sharing key findings, Naik and Randolph shed light on the similarities and differences between the two countries and how their research can feed into policy.

All project resources, including research reports, academic papers, blogs and films are available on smallcitydreaming.org

Listen to the full CPR podcast, ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Senior Fellow, Shubhagato Dasgupta and Fellow, Arkaja Singh, talking about deaths due to manual scavenging.

Manual scavenging has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of sanitation in India. In very simple terms, manual scavenging is work that involves directly handling raw or partly treated human excreta. Historically, this practice was associated with ‘dry latrines’, in which fresh excreta is lifted manually, and on a daily basis.

We have not as yet completely eradicated dry latrines, even though it has been banned since 1993, but in the meantime, many newer forms of sanitation infrastructure have proliferated, which also involve unsafe sanitation work and often manual scavenging. This includes the work of cleaning septic tanks, latrine pits, drains and sewerage systems, and also in cleaning railway tracks and other open defecation spots where sanitation workers directly interface with faecal matter. All of this work is prohibited under the manual scavenging law, as we have pointed out in our policy brief Manual Cleaning of Sewers and Septic Tanks. This work as it is performed currently, is also degrading and humiliating, and has a long association with caste discrimination.

We also now have an understanding of manual scavenging as extremely hazardous work that kills its workers. According to a recent estimate by the National Commission of Safai Karamcharis, 123 people have died in cleaning sewers and septic tanks since 1 Jan 2017, which adds up to one death in every five days. Official numbers estimate that approximately 53,000 people are engaged in manual scavenging work, but other estimates, such as from Dalberg, suggest that as many as 5 million people are engaged in some form of manual scavenging work. It is also worth pointing out here that unsafe sanitation work and manual scavenging is almost an everyday practice – safety norms and protocols are routinely flouted in cleaning and maintenance services – and this includes sanitation infrastructure in the most upmarket hotels, commercial complexes and gated communities, in publicly managed sewerage systems, and in private septic tanks, which proliferate across urban India.

Meanwhile there are severe inadequacies in our legal and institutional response, which need urgent attention. In our podcast, we try to disentangle some of the issues around unsafe sanitation infrastructure and the reasons why our current infrastructure cleaning and management practices are killing people. These deaths are largely on account of poisonous gases that accumulate in closed septic tanks, sewer lines and in sewerage treatment facilities. Much of this work could be significantly mechanised: emptying work in septic tanks should be carried out by vacuum tankers, and limited problem-solving human interventions in sewerage systems should be carried out by highly trained people, following protocols to ensure that their intervention is limited and made entirely safe.

Faecal Sludge Management

In our work on sanitation in non-sewered areas, we emphasise that Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) interventions are needed to squarely address the challenge of establishing safe and hygienic systems for management of our sanitation infrastructure.  At the same time, we need deep and systematic reform in the management of sewerage systems, to ensure that no worker is made to do dangerous sanitation work. Our current work on sanitation in CPR, under the Scaling City Institutions for India project (SCIFI) is focused on FSM, which has the potential to address the sanitation needs of 60% of our urban population and an even larger and growing proportion of the population in non-urban areas, who currently live in non-sewered areas and rely on septic tanks for their sanitation needs. For safe and improved FSM services however, states and cities implementing FSM need to articulate and implement a coherent FSM plan that emphasises the elimination of manual scavenging and dangerous sanitation work as a central objective. And on our part, we need to continuously engage with the issue, understand the reasons for its persistence, and hold our governments, our residents’ associations and ourselves to account for its complete eradication.

Listen to the full CPR podcast, ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Senior Fellow and former Foreign Secretary, Ambassador Shyam Saran, discussing the recent turmoil in Sri Lanka’s politics.

With the sacking of Wickremesinghe and Rajapaksa’s appointment as the new Prime Minister, the island nation grapples with political unrest. In such a scenario, it becomes important for India to understand how these developments affect the larger scheme of things in South Asia, especially given China’s position. Saran sheds light on how India should best approach this crisis and what the future course of action should be.

Four years ago, the announcement of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) was greeted with general optimism. It claimed to have learnt from the errors of its predecessors, which had been criticised across several quarters. For instance, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) had found that despite over ₹10,000 crore spent between 2009 and 2014, not only were toilet construction numbers overestimated by as much as a 100% in some states, but more than a third of these new toilets were already defunct. Researchers and practitioners attributed this to the programme’s ‘government-led, infrastructure-centred, subsidy-based and supply-led’ approach to implementation. The SBM insisted that it would not repeat these mistakes.

SBM signalled this departure in several ways. A more substantive measure of success was adopted by shifting the focus to outcomes in the form of Open Defecation Free (ODF) villages. A community led approach for sustainable behaviour change was announced as the preferred medium of intervention. Emphasis on Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) was ensured by fixing a minimum threshold of communications expenditure for the states. On site sanitation in the form of twin leach pit toilet technology was recommended as suitable to rural ecology.

As the Mission gathered momentum, districts and then states have rapidly been declared ODF, and the focus has once again become the completion of predetermined (and not necessarily accurate) toilet construction targets.

The impact of this lopsided and construction driven implementation was observed by the Accountability Initiative in its study of ODF panchayats in Udaipur. Although declared (and in a subset of cases, verified) ODF, almost 20% of the surveyed households were found to be lacking a toilet. Usage lagged further behind with more than a third (38%) of even those who owned toilets reporting that they defecated in the open on the day of the survey. While this, in itself, invalidates their ODF status, the lack of awareness generation actually compounds matters further. We found that a majority of the toilets being constructed in Udaipur were (claimed to be) septic tanks or single pits, which the mission discourages.

In Udaipur, the access usage gap reveals that communication efforts did not keep pace with the construction blitz. Indeed, less than half of our sampled households had been visited in the context of SBM. Awareness of important aspects, including sludge management and hygiene, was found to be very low.

In order to understand whether this dissonance between policy and implementation is an aberration, AI has been analysing the administrative data of the mission every year. The figures are telling.

Of the ₹41,111 crores spent by SBM-G (SBM Gramin) from the launch of the mission till January 15, 2018, 96% (close to ₹40,000 crore) was spent on toilet construction subsidies alone. In contrast, less than 2% (close to ₹602 crores) of all expenditure was on IEC efforts. Effectively, this translates to an average overall expenditure of ₹9,207 in each of the 606,095 villages that SBM is active in, or an average annual expenditure of just over ₹2000 per village. Further constraints are placed by the fact that on an average, 16% (almost 99,000) of these villages do not have local swachhagrahis or community mobilisers even now. It is noteworthy that the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) rejected the ODF declarations of two states in September 2018.

Not only have known mistakes not been pre-empted, but new complications have arisen due to the proliferation of unsuitable toilets. The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey of 2017-18 observed that 71% toilets were either single pits or septic tanks. Many of these may eventually require manual handling of faecal sludge, and are thus banned under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. Meanwhile, one manual scavenger has died every five days this year in India, many while cleaning septic tanks. Sludge/Septage treatment and safe disposal facilities, or even mechanised sludge clearance services, remain virtually non-existent in rural India.

To learn more about CPR’s work on manual scavenging and faecal sludge management, tune into a podcast and a blog by the Scaling City Institutions for India: Sanitation project, here .

The challenge before the mission is now two-fold – to sustain the gains already made, and to address the shortcomings in the process. An honest and transparent self-appraisal is an urgent first step.

The more human rights-based approaches have been mainstreamed, the more we expect legislation to provide means for the implementation of rights framed at a generic level in constitutions or by the higher judiciary. India is no exception, having been at the forefront of the broadening of the gamut of fundamental rights, in particular through an expansive reading of the right to life, for instance, to include a human right to sanitation. Surprisingly, there is no legislation that takes forward the mandate laid out by the courts. Yet, given the increasing policy and political importance of sanitation, the Union government has been pro-active in trying to ensure every person gets access to toilets at home. In rural areas, interventions of the Union government have been through administrative directions that are adopted by the executive and regularly modified over time according to changing policy and political priorities. None of the instruments that have guided the sector over time refer to the right to sanitation. While the link is not made directly, these interventions are in effect the mechanism through which the right is at least in part realised. This is confirmed from two different perspectives on the ground. In rural areas, people make no difference between legislation and administrative directions. What the government implements is de facto the law and is seen as such both by the rights holders and by local government officials. This raises multiple questions in the current context of a very strong push towards ensuring the country is open defecation free by 2019. Right holders are known as beneficiaries and thus not in a position to hold the state accountable for its actions or inactions. Increasingly, rights holders are becoming duty holders, indeed in some cases they are required to build toilets. Further, the realisation of the right includes strong arm measures, such as naming and shaming campaigns at the local level and fines for open defecation. This article explores the multiple issues arising from a fast-evolving context where the clear recognition of human rights is not matched by implementation measures that follow the same logic. This must be looked at both from the point of view of the state and the individuals and communities that are at the receiving end of interventions that are meant to be in their favour.

Access the article here.

Center for Policy Research (CPR) along with partners International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Energy Resource Centre- Cape Town (ERC), and Prayas (Energy Group), has published a set of policy briefs to inform India’s climate contribution for the upcoming global negotiations in Paris. This set of briefs lays out ways for India’s climate approach to meet both sustainable development objectives and create momentum towards an effective global climate agreement. These include:

• A framework for India’s approach at Paris;
• An understanding of India’s energy needs;
• An understanding of the scope for multiple benefits;
• A methodology to operationalise multiple benefits; and
• Recommendations to strengthen implementing institutions

These policy briefs are produced by produced by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) as part of a larger project: Toward a Robust Development Focused INDC.

Watch the full video (above) of the launch of CPR’s policy document, Policy Challenges 2019-2024. Policy Challenges 2019-2024, is a compendium of essays written by CPR scholars articulating key policy challenges and possible solutions across a range of issues that confront India today. These include foreign policy and national security; environment, energy and climate change; the economy and welfare; regulation and resources; federalism and urbanisation. This is a multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary document that reflects on how India can negotiate the policy challenges it confronts and build a 21st century policy environment. The document can be accessed here.

The document was launched through conversations with:

• Ajay Mathur – Director General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
• Suhasini Haidar – National Editor, The Hindu
• Devesh Kapur – Director, Asia Programs and Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
• KP Krishnan – Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India
• Jyoti Malhotra, Editor, National and Strategic Affairs, ThePrint India

Navroz K Dubash, Professor, CPR; Ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhyay, Senior Visiting Fellow, CPR; Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive, CPR; and Partha Mukhopadhyay, Senior Fellow, CPR, moderated the different conversations.

Abstract:

India is at an important juncture in its development trajectory. From rapid urbanisation to declining agricultural productivity; from weak human capital to the need for creating productive jobs; from new security threats to the need to re-position itself in a changing global order; from growing energy demands to the need to address rapid environmental degradation, India today has to negotiate multiple and conflicting socio-economic challenges. Decisions and actions taken over the next five years will be likely to shape the future of our economic and political trajectory. This document is an effort to spark debate and ideas on how India can negotiate these transitions across a range of sectors.

ThePrint was the digital partner for this event.

Coverage of the event by ThePrint can be found below:

• ‘Well-regulated markets, citizen participation critical for future of the Indian state’
• India’s foreign policy needs strategic autonomy and more ambition, experts say
• Need business models that can monetise crop waste to check air pollution, says TERI chief

In the first instalment of the ‘Dialogues on Sanitation’ series titled Legal Perspectives on Sanitation in Urban India, Scaling City Institutions for India: Sanitation (SCI-FI) cerebrates mechanisms to improve the regulatory regime on urban sanitation.

The policy note, synthesised from the Dialogue, analyses several aspects such as the role of law and regulation in Faecal Sludge Management (FSM), rights of sanitary workers, and public-private participation in urban sanitation. The seminar had four thematic sessions focussing on managing public and private sectors in FSM, law of sanitation, FSM journey through the lens of the law and understanding environmental regulations and technical standards to build legal mandates. The sessions featured Madhu Krishna, Santhosh Raghavan, Rajesh Rangarajan, KB Oblesh, Arkaja Singh, Vishnu Sudarshan and Krishna K. This was followed by a session on ‘key take-aways’ that explored possible solutions to understand the emerging interfaces between markets and regulatory frameworks.

The event brought together senior policymakers, city and state level implementers, technocrats, members of the civil society and legal experts to learn from their experience in states and in implementation to initiate a broader discussion on the potential for roles and responsibilities for FSM from the viewpoint of legal frameworks.

Access the policy note here.

Access the videos from the event here.

About the series

This is the 1st Dialogue in a series planned by the Scaling City Institution for India: Sanitation (SCI-FI) initiative with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). This dialogue series builds on the CORP lecture series and seeks to provide a platform for discussing the experiences of the researchers and practitioners on urban sanitation across various thematic areas.