Advocacy and Consultation workshop on Safe Sanitation on the occasion of World Toilet day

Background

Globally, there are 3.5 billion people still living without safe toilets. 419 million people still practice ‘open defecation’. This global crisis poses a threat to nature and everyone’s health, particularly women, girls, and other vulnerable groups. It has been an annual United Nations Observance since 2013. World Toilet Day, celebrated every year on 19th November, raises awareness about people living without access to safely managed sanitation. Department of Urban Development, Uttar Pradesh in collaboration with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) recognizes World Toilet Day as an important occasion for initiating as well as culminating actions for accelerating safe sanitation initiatives- not limiting to only initiatives around toilets but addressing the whole sanitation value chain i.e., from containments to emptying & transportation to treatment and reuse. 

Context

Earlier, with the advent of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) 1.0 Guidelines, the focus in India was toilet infrastructure creation. Further, with the onset of the latest SBM 2.0 guidelines and SwachhSurvekshan, the toilet infrastructures are being envisaged to be aspirational. These ‘toilets’ being aspirational will still face the challenges that are related to their containment systems- especially emptying and transportation of sludge from households in narrow and congested lanes. Further, the faecal sludge transforms into bio-solids after treatment which can be used in different ways to promote circular economy by recovering resources from waste and reducing the environmental impacts. However, issues and challenges related to bio-solids in India are not fully explored and a lot of it is yet to be studied. 

Objective

Keeping all the above in mind, on the occasion of World Toilet Day, the Department of Urban Development in collaboration with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is organizing a half-day launch cum National workshop to serve the following objectives- 

1. Launch of –
2. Advisory on Aspirational Toilets in UP
3. Ease of Septage Management (ESM) report
4. National consultation with sector experts on-
5. Enabling Reuse of bio-solids from faecal sludge and co-treatment plants
6. Man to Machine- desludging options for settlements in narrow lanes

For more information, Kindly contact:

Workshop Co-ordinator

Subrata Chakraborty
Senior Programme Manager
Water Programme
Mobile: +91 9433229438
Email: subrata.chakraborty@cseindia.org