"India can send rockets to the moon but we don’t want to invest in technology that removes the need for humans to clean toilets manually." Social activist and Ramon Magsasay awardee Bezwada Wilson questioned the government’s commitment to eradicating manual scavenging in the country by pointing out that the government’s flagship programme, Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), seems to be counting on the persistence of manual scavenging. “India can build cryogenic engines and send rockets to the moon but we don’t want to invest in technology that removes the need for humans to clean toilets manually,” he said. Highlighting how the indignity of manual scavenging was invisibilised in society, he recalled, “In my school textbooks, I never read about what B.R. “Manual scavenging is the smallest of India’s problems, but as a nation, in the 70 years of independence, we haven’t managed to fix it.

Source: The Hindu August 23, 2016 11:37 UTC