A Field Worker’s Diary _ Part 71
“A doubt began to sprout in my mind, even after improving technology and transforming the image of sanitation work as an honorable profession, will people from other castes come forward to do this work? Maybe, “transforming” is not the right word. Why is this profession stuck in the disreputable category?”
The second-fastest growing city in Telangana, after Hyderabad, is Warangal. Last year just around this time, I went to Warangal with a colleague of mine. As part of our learning process, our journey was to do a study on the sanitation system in Warangal.
The Municipal Corporation staff there told us that the city, which had a population of 8 lakhs as per the 2011 Census, had crossed the 10-lakh population mark now. Since it was a city without an underground drainage system, managing the sewage water was quite a hard task. Along with that, as there was rampant open defecation, the Corporation had put its focus on that. As per a survey done in 2015, around 30% of the households didn’t have toilets. Some of the old toilets didn’t have septic tanks. They were directly connected to the drainage. Firstly, the Corporation reconstructed all those old toilets. Then, they motivated numerous households to construct toilets. Earlier, there were 27 public toilets in the city; first, they were brought into use. Moreover, 23 more public toilets were constructed. In addition to the fifty toilets, they talked with the management of petrol bunks to let them bring the toilets in the bunks within the reach of the public. For women, some toilets with facilities such as sanitary pad vending machines, incinerators, etc. were also set-up.
In this way, they were able to bring around hundred public toilets (1 for every 500 metres) within people’s reach. All these attempts bore fruits — in 2018, Warangal city was identified by the government as open defecation free (ODF).
During our visit, we managed to visit one newly-constructed public toilet and one SHE toilet in the city, and understand the issues regularly faced in their management. For the management of the toilets in the city, approximately 200 people were given the necessary training and appointed at the toilets. Most of these people belong to the Safai Karamchari households. However, I was surprised when the manager of the toilet that we had visited said he belonged to the Brahmin caste. After giving it a little bit of thought, I thought of something: Bindeshwar Pathak, the pioneer who revolutionized sanitation and built Sulabh complexes across the nation, is a Bihari Brahmin. When I asked the manager, he replied that he was also a Bihari.
Let’s get back to the point, the work of the Corporation staff didn’t end with solving one problem. There is a much bigger problem ahead. The issue of sewage management, in a city with such a big population and numerous toilets, got exacerbated with the issue of human faeces management. For sewage management, the staff said that the government had already approved three sludge treatment plants and their construction was going on.
Furthermore, for the process of turning the tonnes of human excreta from public toilets as well as individual toilets into fertilizer, they had already built a Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant, and are turning 25000 litres of faecal matter into fertilizer.
The plant was situated quite far from the city, somewhere in the midst of some hillocks. There was no movement of people anywhere nearby. They have named it — Sanitation Resource Park. Earlier, after the household septic tanks were cleaned, all the collected excreta was dumped away from the city. After the construction of this plant, all the excreta is reaching here. Two types of technologies: Pyrolysis (thermal decomposition process) and geo tube are used to process the excreta. Quite surprisingly, there was not even a whiff of bad smell even though 25000 litres of faeces was being processed. There was no need for any person to touch the excreta at any point during the process. It was a fully-automatic system. They just need to attach a tube to the septic tank, the rest of the process is taken care of by the machines. Amongst all of the processes, the geo tube technology is a very environmentally-friendly method. The produced fertilizer had been gathered into sacks. Speaking about the fertilizer, the plant engineer explained, while touching the fertilizer with his hand, that this fertilizer was devoid of any virus, was odourless, and was safe for the environment and people.
Apart from the engineer, a total of 10 people were working in the plant. All of them belonged to the Safai Karamchari caste. A doubt began to sprout in my mind, even after improving technology and transforming the image of sanitation work as an honorable profession, will people from other castes come forward to do this work? Maybe, “transforming” is not the right word. Why is this profession stuck in the disreputable category? Their work is of utmost importance for human society to live life in a better way! From that time onwards, a thought kept haunting me: Why does our society, which cannot even imagine functioning without them, look down upon them and their profession?
Bharathi Kode