Urban ladder

Safely managing faecal sludge is India's new sanitation challenge. In the absence of adequate rural treatment plants, a few states rope in underutilised urban facilities

- SWATI BHATIA RAVI KUMAR

IF ONLY toilets could ensure safe sanitation. After constructing 110 million toilets in 60 months, India declared itself open-defecation free on October 2, 2019. The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2019-20, a government-commissioned survey of the sanitation scheme, scheme, Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), soon stated that 99.9 per cent households in rural India now practise safe disposal of excreta. Despite this civilisational leap forward, India's sanitation challenge remains far from over. It is another matter that some people are already slipping back into the habit of open defecation due to dysfunctional toilets or lack of water.

As per SBM dashboard, almost all of the 160 million households in rural India have toilets. Assuming that every household has five members and that an average human releases 128 g of faeces daily, as per the 2015 study in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, rural India generates 0.12 million tonnes of faecal matter a day. In the absence of safe disposal and treatment, such huge volume of waste could create a new sanitation nightmare-a situation similar to when India did not have toilets and exposure to contaminated faecal caused millions of unavoidable deaths.

This is the reason, SBM had laid emphasis on twin-pit toilets built with brick-lined honeycomb design. Such a toilet is like a self-cona a tained treatment plant, where the excreta gets decomposed and can be then safely reused as manure (see 'Mission accomplished but...', safe disposal and treatment, such huge volume of waste could create a new sanitation nightmare-a situation similar to when India did not have toilets and exposure to contaminated faecal caused millions of unavoidable deaths.