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How Swachh Bharat can clean up its act

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Vinaya Padmanabhan
Vinaya PadmanabhanDec 01, 2015 | 16:43

How Swachh Bharat can clean up its act

The Narendra Modi-led government's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (urban) [SBA] is a well-intentioned policy that promises to bring sanitation to urban households. By 2019, at an estimated expenditure of Rs 62 crore, the aim is to construct public, community and private toilets for urban residents.

But by focusing primarily on toilets, the policy ignores the fact that sanitation is a process - one that involves transporting excreta to treatment plants and then treating it so that it can be safely released into water bodies. Since India lacks the infrastructure to transport and treat excreta, central and state governments must acknowledge that constructing toilets is only a superficial solution to a deep-seated problem.

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According to the SBA (urban) policy, toilets have to be connected to sewers, but only if sewers are located close by. The problem is that in many Indian cities, they are unlikely to be. Although 82 per cent of the 78 million urban households have toilets within their premises, Census figures cite that only 40 per cent of these households are connected to the piped sewer system.

Moreover, all sewers don't lead to treatment plants. For example, a thousand households in the Andaman and Nicobar islands are connected to sewers even though the state does not have a treatment plant, casting some doubt on where the waste end up.

Like sewers, there is a shortage of sewage treatment plants. In 2005, urban India had only 231 operational plants treating domestic sewage, according to India's central pollution board. With so few plants for 903 cities and towns, it is not surprising that 80 per cent of the total 29,000 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage generated flowed into water bodies in raw form.

Today, India has 522 operational sewage treatment plants, up from 231 in 2005. But despite this increase in numbers, these treatment plants have the capacity to treat less than half of the massive 38,254 MLD that we produce.

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Inter-state differences in infrastructure levels will be relevant in the SBA's implementation. Presently, Maharashtra has the capacity to treat 4,683 MLD of sewage, more than the combined treatment capacity of the states of Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, states with urban populations between six and ten million households.

Another shocking statistic is how the 34 plants in Delhi have the capacity to treat five times more sewage than Madhya Pradesh and 23 times more sewage than Kerala. Infrastructure is skewed in Delhi's favour despite the fact it has an urban population that is similar to Madhya Pradesh and Kerala.

If India continues to build toilets by ignoring the groundwork, it will succeed in appearing clean, when in reality the lack of sewers and treatment facilities will result in polluted water bodies, posing risks to health and the environment.

"Sanitation is a process, and we need to study the risks each stage in the process pose to human health. Building toilets without thinking about treatment will not solve the sanitation problem," says sanitation expert and director of eco-friendly architecture firm Biome, S Vishwanath.

Septic tanks and on-site sanitation systems are an alternative to public sewers and plants, but come with attendant problems. One issue is that households have to foot the bill for installation, maintenance and repair, leading to wide and distressing variations in their quality and efficacy.

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For instance, many septic tanks flout government building codes and technical specifications, according to sanitation specialist, Somya Sethuraman. They are also not appropriately maintained and a draft government report on sanitation published online by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) admits that in many cases faecal sludge from tanks is cleaned manually, a practice outlawed by a central Act.

Also, the government is unable to monitor the management of septic tanks effectively. Many local governments and water utilities do not have clear regulations on how to manage waste from septic tanks and on-site systems. In states that have these regulations such as Tamil Nadu, they are not properly enforced. "I am not convinced of the government's ability to monitor tanks and enforce standards," says S Vishwanath.

Successive central and state governments have failed to invest in key sanitation infrastructure. One reason could be that governments prefer to spend on what is visible, such as toilets, as they assume people will notice them unlike sewage networks that run underground. Also, it is likely that citizens do not hold the government accountable for sewage treatment because of the not-in-my-backyard syndrome; once excreta is out of sight, it is flushed out of mind as well.

Yet, there is some hope. Like the SBA (urban), other urban programmes such as the Atal Mission For Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Smart City project have large allocations and a mandate to construct much-needed infrastructure in cities.

These policies would do well to study the data on sanitation, and re-orient their allocations to focus on treatment and not only on toilets. Cleanliness cannot be achieved unless there is focus on what happens to waste after it is produced and India would do well to start by cleaning up its act.

Last updated: December 01, 2015 | 17:53
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