November 19th, 2018
India’s flagship sanitation program, Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), highlights both the importance of latrine use, and also of “safe and proper disposal”. Since most of urban India is not connected to sewers, the SBM recommends that cities work towards technological, financing and governance initiatives that would ensure safe fecal sludge management. In practice, this means mechanical (i.e. truck-and-hose) sludge removal as opposed to the now-illegal manual method of emptying toilet pits. But how do cleaners live and work; what do their days and nights demand of them; and to what extent does their work rely on India’s age-old caste system, about which SBM policies are silent? What, in other words, does the “back-end” of Swachh Bharat look like in an Indian city? In this photo-essay we trace the flow of waste from pit to dump in urban India, making visible the labor that produces the sanitary city [i]