Monsoons in India are not just harbingers of good news. They also bring a whole host of diseases with them including malaria, dengue and cholera. The secret to protect yourself from these diseases might lie in how you treat your septic tank.
The Swachh Bharat story cannot become reality unless we ensure manual scavenging is actually eradicated. And this can only happen when we change individual practises and upgrade India’s sanitation infrastructure. And when we make sure we don’t treat lives of sanitation workers as disposable.
Untreated waste is not just a critical threat to public health, it is also a major threat to the environment. Toxic waste contaminates our air, soil and water, creating a cycle of harm breaking which will need all of us to make lifestyle changes at an individual level too.
The story of India’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has been focused more on the optics than the fundamentals of enabling access to sanitation so far. This needs to change for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan to truly become the pathbreaking success it can be.
Cleaning septic tanks and sewerage systems in India is often accompanied by loss of life because we still ask humans to get into septic tanks and manholes to clean them. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have a natural solution that is much easier and better for the environment too.
One of the biggest issues affecting health, hygiene, sanitation, air and water quality and how our cities step into the future is urban waste management. Mountains of garbage dotting landfills all over urban India are not just an eyesore but an urgent crisis we need to resolve immediately.
Everywhere you go, you will see the virtues of antibacterial cleaning being touted by all and sundry. But the entire antibacterial approach to cleaning is actually causing us more harm than we know and we need to ask ourselves if antibacterial chemicals deserve a place in our homes, offices and environment.
Many household cleaning products – not limited to floor and bathroom cleaners alone – are loaded with combinations of harmful chemicals with proven ill-effects on human and animal health and also the environment. Here are the most harmful ones you need to watch out for.
Sanitation is crucially interlinked with health and nutrition in more ways than one may immediately realise. In India alone, the lethal effects of the link between inadequate sanitation and ill-health is visible in some very dismal numbers, especially in the health of India’s children.
Brazil and India have similar trajectories in industrialisation, population, rapid urbanisation and the need to implement quick solutions for civic issues. But Brazil has cracked the urban sanitation demon, providing workable solutions for its society and lessons for India.
