India’s sanitation emergency – Al Jazeera

New Delhi promised to build hundreds of public toilets for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Only 9 were built, and none of them are functioning. This short report from Al Jazeera’s Sohail Rahman highlights the fact that over 50 per cent of Indians have no access to clean toilets. It focuses on the lack of facilities in India’s growing cities and in schools. The report features rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, the inevitable Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh International and UNICEF India’s Suzanne Coates.

Productive sanitation – the honey suckers of Bengaluru

Indigenously developed honey sucker in Bengaluru (Bangalore), south India. Photo: Vishwanath Sankrathai

The dumping of untreated faecal sludge in urban areas has been described as an ecological time bomb. In African cities, typically less than 15 percent of residents are served by centralised sewage systems, and figures for Asian countries are not much better. Yet there is a growing number of examples where re-use of urban faecal waste as fertiliser is linking city households and peri-urban farmers in a chain that provides both affordable sanitation and soil fertility. A recent study of sanitation services provided in Bengaluru (Bangalore), in southern India, suggests such approaches deserve to be legalised and scaled up within an appropriate legal framework to ensure the safety of farm workers and consumers.

Read the full article in the New Agriculturist, July 2012

Commercial productive use of faecal sludge in Bengaluru, India

Waste is a resource in the wrong place. People who have no sewer connection do go to the toilet though urban authorities seem to think differently given the neglect of the multitude of sanitation self-service models that have emerged in many cities.

During a webinar, which was organised on 2 May 2012, Joep Verhagen of the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre presented the results of a case study, which investigates a model that is based on the productive use of faecal sludge by farmers in and around Bengaluru (Bangalore), the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. This particular service has emerged without any technical or financial support.

For more IRC webinars go to: www.irc.nl/page/69625

Disney’s 1940s sanitation and hygiene promotion films

Still from Disney short film "Cleanliness Brings Health"

In the 1940s, the Walt Disney Studios produced a series of educational films on sanitation and hygiene promotion for developing countries. The films, in the Health for the Americas series, were aimed at Latin America. They were commissioned by the now defunct Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), which was later renamed Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA).

Conference on Decentralised Wastewater Management in Asia – Meeting Urban Sanitation Challenges at Scale, Nagpur, India, 20-23 Nov 2012

This is the fourth of the International Water Association’s (IWA) Conference on DEWATS in Asia series.

Co-organised with the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (BORDA), the Consortium for DEWATS Dissemination Society (CDD), the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute of India (NEERI), the Indian Water Works Association (IWWA) and the Indian Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD).

The conference will examine DEWATS (Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Systems), from a technical and engineering perspective, but also taking into consideration the social, institutional and financial aspects that determine the success of these technologies.

Abstract deadline: 30 April 2012

For more information go to conference the site: www.iwadewats-nagpur.com

E-learning course Governance in Urban Sanitation

The Local Development Programme of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) is conducting the next session of its e-learning course Governance in Urban Sanitation from 19 March to 25 May 2012.

The e-course aims to enhance the capacity of local decision-makers and sanitation practitioners to make the most enlightened decisions and investments in the area of urban sanitation. It provides analytical tools to understand the financial and institutional framework of the sanitation sector, taking into account the needs of urban poor communities. This e-course has been awarded with the International ECBCheck Quality Label for e-Learning.

The deadline for registration is 14 March 2012.
Registration fee: US$ 400

Full information about the course is available at www.unitar.org/event/sanitation2012

India, Mumbai: man killed for taking too long in public toilet

Queuing for the Gents in Mumbai. Photo: Hindustan Times

A slum resident from Mahim in Mumbai ended up killing his neighbour whom he felt had taken too long in a public toilet. Locals feel the tragic death could have been avoided if only the civic authorities had provided sufficient public toilets.

“We have no sanitation facility. Sometimes, basic human needs take over all rationale. and that is what happened today. It’s a tragedy that two lives were destroyed over such a petty matter. The authorities must take note of this,” said a resident.

The unfortunate incident took place on Saturday evening, 28 January 2012, when Simon Lingeree went to a public toilet near Devaji Govind Chawl, the slum where he lived. With Lingeree apparently taking too long, Santosh Kargutkar (40), who was in the queue, started banging on the door and abused him

When Lingeree finally came out, the two got into a fight. Lingeree was knocked unconscious and rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead. A few hours later the police arrested Kargutkar and charged him with murder.

Source: Times of India, 30 Jan 2012

Bangladesh: WaterAid gets Swiss and Swedish grants for WASH projects

WaterAid has signed funding agreements with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) for two WASH projects in Bangladesh.

Photo: WaterAid/ Abir Abdullah & ASM Shafiqur Rahman

SDC and WaterAid signed a grant agreement on 30 November 2011 for a 316 million Taka (US$ 3.84 million) three year rural WASH programme. SDC will provide 265.5 million Taka (US$ 3.23 million), and WaterAid the rest. If successful, SDC will extend support for another 3 years.

Most of the funding will go the ‘Promotion of water supply, sanitation and hygiene in hard -to-reach areas of rural Bangladesh’ project, which aims to provide safe drinking water to 500,000 rural people, latrines to 1.3 million and hygiene education to another 1 million people. WaterAid’s inclusion and climate change programmes will also benefit.

Sanitation financing models for the urban poor – new IRC thematic overview paper

Sijbesma, C., 2011. Sanitation financing models for the urban poor. (Thematic overview paper ; 25).  The Hague: IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
120 p. : 44 boxes, 1 fig., 4 tab.
Includes references, glossary and lists of resources.
Available at: <http://www.irc.nl/top25>

The provision of sanitation services in low-income urban areas is one of the greatest challenges in development. Population growth in developing countries currently outpaces sanitation growth, especially in urban areas. Consequently, in urban areas where poor people reside, and where “formal” sanitation services are not available to them, they experience the compounded effect of serious economic disadvantages such as high risk to public health; a dirty and contaminated environment; no basic human dignity and safety for a large part of the world’s population, especially for adolescent girls and women.

Pakistan, Karachi: sanitation, more than just household latrines

This moving anecdote illustrates how the lack of public toilet affects women in Pakistan. It was posted as a comment to an article in newspaper Dawn about the release in Pakistan of WaterAid’s report “Off-track, off-target: Why investment in water, sanitation and hygiene is not reaching those who need it most”.

Besides 48 million Pakistanis who defecated in the open, there are millions of women in big cities who have no place to go to when out of their homes. Pakistani women are shoppers, they spend hours in bazaars where there are few public toilets for men, and most certainly, none for women. I experienced an incident sometime ago, and also sent the story to Jung newspaper; they published it under the heading “Vo auwrat”, but nothing was done about it. I was approached by a young boy hardly 5-6 years old near Empress Market who asked me where the toilet was. I stopped and looked around and saw a young woman in burka sitting on her heels near the wall on the footpath with tears in her eyes, and she covered her face when she saw me looking at her. I did nothing, I could do nothing, I just walked away. People who have been to the Empress Market know that nothing could be done to help that poor lady. How many women go through that agony in Pakistan, everyday, I don’t know.

Source: Agha Ata, comment posted 20 Nov 2011 on “Causing a Stink”, Dawn, 19 Nov 2011