Abstract
Abstract India's flagship program on sanitation and hygiene – the Swachh Bharat Mission – aims to eliminate open defecation and to manage urban waste for a ‘Clean India’. The emptying of toilet pits and the transport of waste are as critical as more toilets are for sustainable sanitation. In unsewered cities of the global South, these services are mainly provided by privately run cleaning trucks. We find that the physical and social mechanisms through which these services are organized are virtually invisible in national fecal sludge and waste management policies. Based on a rich ethnography of cleaning trucks in Bangalore, India, we show that trucking operations dispose of sludge in ways that harm both public health and the environment, and that the caste composition of sanitation work helps to keep it invisible from officials and the public. We draw on the concept of the social role of disgust to explain the seen-and-unseen nature of these trucks. ‘Seeing’ sludge management as it is practiced is essential for understanding how the sanitary city is being produced and for the success of future sanitation reforms. This article has been made Open Access thanks to the generous support of a global network of libraries as part of the Knowledge Unlatched Select initiative.
Highlights
In India, as in the rest of the world, a flush toilet has become a symbol of modern urban life
If rural India is grappling with toilet construction and behavior change, urban India is grappling with what comes later, after the construction of toilets and the established behavior of toilet use
Based on a thorough document review, we show that sanitation reform policies in India make almost no mention of the septic tank cleaning trucks upon which back-end services depend
Summary
In India, as in the rest of the world, a flush toilet has become a symbol of modern urban life. This document explicitly recognizes truck-based cleaning; it recommends that urban local bodies (ULBs) be provided with trucks, and that truck operations be regularized as part of SBM (Urban) These guidelines, barely acknowledge the current truck-based FSM practices upon which they must inevitably build: as we show below, truck operators find ways to reach and empty tanks, they find times and places in which the sludge can be dumped, and they understand that their ‘informality’ is both a burden to, and useful for, under-resourced ULBs. caste hierarchies and prejudices are tightly intertwined with the tasks of cleaning and transporting human waste (Jewitt ; Coffey & Spears ; Doron & Jeffrey ); this relationship and its policy implications are completely missing from any policy documents. We just respond to calls by the public if they dump too close to a residential area.’
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