Closing Access Loop: Situating Post-infrastructural Assurance Circumstances in Rural Sanitation

Abstract

Ill-health outcomes and squalor living conditions are inextricably linked with decommissioned water and sanitation considerations. The recent developments in the country bear witness to the fact that the increased awareness and priority has garnered inquiry, multiple interventions, and policy responses into the wider aspects of the sector. The key findings of recently held National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey 2017–2018, claim an almost full coverage of toilets as well as usage of the same. Inequality concerns in deriving benefits from interventions may not figure early in the availability of infrastructural arrangements, given the firm focus on the sector, but there are inequitable experiences which emerge post water and sanitation infrastructural assurance posing challenges for people in rural areas. From the benefit of hindsight, it could be inferred that water and sanitation centric interventions often suffer from a condition called ‘slippage’—an eventuality which besets water and sanitation arrangements over a period of time while engendering people go back to previous unhygienic preferences. In this literature-based paper, we explore the plausible reasons behind the occurrence and draw interpretations grounded in Amartya Sen’s view of justice which looks at an activity as ‘procedural fairness,’ i.e. what people are able to do and be with a given amount of resources. The analysis would then be followed by the review of empirical studies and sustainable sanitation practices of nations which have achieved open defecation free status, and learning outcomes that how they have managed to sustain it over a period of time.