Women and Invisible Boundaries: A Case of Slippage in Sanitation in Two Gram Panchayats, Shravasti, UP, India

ABSTRACT

Sustainable management of water and sanitation is inextricably linked with women’s health and well-being. This paper investigates slippage in sanitation, experienced by women beneficiaries of the Swacch Bharat Mission Rural programme through Amartya Sen’s conception of justice. A total of 135 individuals were interviewed from 49 households in Kanjadwa and Madhnagar Manoharpur Gram Panchayats, Shravasti, India, out of which 90 were women. As per findings, 30% of women practice open defaecation despite possessing toilets, resulting in slippage. The Sanitation Well-being framework is deployed to study slippage and its linkage with women’s agency. Personal, cultural, and structural factors contributing to this are child marriage, denial of education and employment opportunities, slut shaming, victim blaming, domestic violence, and character assassination. These are made worse by the state adoption of misogynistic IEC messages that reinforce cultural stereotypes and worsen women's condition. In the quest to attain ODF status in Ikauna Block, UP, the current sanitation programme became a tool of suppression. Consequently, we understand that open defaecation among women is an outcome of the basic unfreedoms rather than a volitional choice that prevents them from experiencing sanitation well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Capability approach‌
• open defaecation
• sanitation well-being framework
• slippage
• Swacch Bharat Mission-Rural
• women

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

All relevant data are included in the paper or its supplementary information.

Notes

1 The field observations validate the presence of slippage in sanitation. We do not specify the gender of the individuals responsible for the faecal matter (which is acknowledged and documented through women’s responses in the findings section). Instead, we are problematizing the gendered nature of the spaces in rural areas, raising concerns about its impact on the defecation habits of both men and women.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kopal Khare

Dr Kopal Khare holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India. Prior to her research endeavours, she provided consultancy services on research and documentation at Agribusiness Systems International in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. Additionally, she gained experience as a young professional at the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty in Telangana, India, where she coordinated state-supported livelihood generation projects and social security programmes. Khare is an active member of the International Water Association and the Indian Association for Women Studies. Her research interests encompass distributive justice, sanitation well-being, gender and development , rural development, and the influence of state and institutional interventions on development programmes. She has contributed to leading journals with her published papers and has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences.

Lavanya Suresh

Prof Lavanya Suresh is currently an Associate Professor at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad campus. She has worked at BITS from 2017 onwards. After her PhD in Political Science (from ISEC Bangalore), she was an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad. She was also awarded the visiting research scholar fellowship under the Graduate Development Program of the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University, USA. Her work focuses on the political ecology of commons in India, with a broader interest in decentralisation and public administration. Besides publications in leading social science journals, she has co-authored a book on “Decentralised Democracy: Gandhi’s Vision and Indian Reality”. She is PI and Co-PI in a number of funded projects and has completed 4 projects successfully.