Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

India has some of the largest gaps in access to safe sanitation in the world, and open defecation (OD) remains a practice that is as common as it is politicized. With the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals now in place, India has recently embarked on a campaign to promote sanitation and eliminate OD nationwide by October 2019. This World Bank-funded campaign is called Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBM) and has had controversial impacts thus far. While more sanitation provisions are needed, insights from political ecology and critical medical anthropology have made clear that merely building more infrastructure or implementing community-based projects are not neutral, clear-cut solutions. People’s demands for sanitation must be interrogated alongside the stigmatization of health behaviors such as OD, to ask whose needs are served by particular discourses. Though a great deal has been written on class politics and urban sanitation in India, less studied are the dynamics of sanitation within heterogeneous slum communities. I draw on fieldwork from two urban slum communities in the state of Maharashtra to highlight how residents of informal housing manage the challenges of toilet provisioning in relation to larger questions of infrastructure access, housing insecurity, and urban development more broadly. I bring these findings into conversation on the ability of SBM to respond more effectively to sanitation challenges on the ground in cities.