TY - BOOK

T1 - Understanding the influence of caste, gender, and religion in community-based sanitation programmes in rural India

AU - Mehta, Nikita

PY - 2025/4/23

Y1 - 2025/4/23

N2 - This thesis aims to understand how caste, religion and gender influence the implementation of community-based sanitation programmes that aim to eradicate the practice of open defecation by convincing people to use toilets in rural India. However, open defecation and toilet adoption in India are deeply steeped in caste relations, religious norms, and political ecology. Through interviews with government bureaucrats, government workers, development actors from NGOs and the World Bank, and rural residents, this thesis examined the implementation of Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in rural areas of two districts in India: Mandi and Churu. Three papers emerged from this research. The first paper examines how shame-based sanitation governance engages with rural spaces and bodies already imbued with the affects of caste as the government frames open defecation as a moral choice rather than inequalities based on caste, economic resources and gender. In the second paper, as part of the sanitation programme, rural residents, religious leaders, and the government negotiate the need for the convenience of toilets in the homesteads with a caste-based understanding of purity and pollution. The third paper uses a policy mobilities framework to examine how CLTS was transferred as a model policy from Mandi to Churu by the World Bank by translating the sanitation policy to local contexts by adhering to dominant caste relations and norms. Overall, this research proposes that sanitation interventions in rural India follow a governmentality of caste, where Western norms of hygiene are married with caste-based understandings of purity and pollution to create rural spaces and institutions adhering to local caste norms. This has important implications as the world aims to provide equitable sanitation for all without leaving the vulnerable behind, following the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Inevitably, as sanitation programmes privilege dominant power relations, such as caste, to ensure the success of these programmes, the vulnerable, such as women and marginalised castes, are excluded.

AB - This thesis aims to understand how caste, religion and gender influence the implementation of community-based sanitation programmes that aim to eradicate the practice of open defecation by convincing people to use toilets in rural India. However, open defecation and toilet adoption in India are deeply steeped in caste relations, religious norms, and political ecology. Through interviews with government bureaucrats, government workers, development actors from NGOs and the World Bank, and rural residents, this thesis examined the implementation of Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in rural areas of two districts in India: Mandi and Churu. Three papers emerged from this research. The first paper examines how shame-based sanitation governance engages with rural spaces and bodies already imbued with the affects of caste as the government frames open defecation as a moral choice rather than inequalities based on caste, economic resources and gender. In the second paper, as part of the sanitation programme, rural residents, religious leaders, and the government negotiate the need for the convenience of toilets in the homesteads with a caste-based understanding of purity and pollution. The third paper uses a policy mobilities framework to examine how CLTS was transferred as a model policy from Mandi to Churu by the World Bank by translating the sanitation policy to local contexts by adhering to dominant caste relations and norms. Overall, this research proposes that sanitation interventions in rural India follow a governmentality of caste, where Western norms of hygiene are married with caste-based understandings of purity and pollution to create rural spaces and institutions adhering to local caste norms. This has important implications as the world aims to provide equitable sanitation for all without leaving the vulnerable behind, following the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Inevitably, as sanitation programmes privilege dominant power relations, such as caste, to ensure the success of these programmes, the vulnerable, such as women and marginalised castes, are excluded.

KW - sanitation and hygiene (WASH)

KW - Caste

KW - gender

KW - affect

KW - religion

KW - POLITICAL ECOLOGY

KW - Governmentality

U2 - 10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2731

DO - 10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2731

M3 - Doctoral Thesis

PB - Lancaster University

ER -