4 highlights
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has the toilet in urban middle class (and the urban rich) households become the Thakur Ka Kuan (Thakur’s Well) of our times – signalling a class system of human waste in the cities? Are we witnessing urban avatars of this metaphor of untouchability – a metaphor which owes its origin to Premchand’s memorable description of the dehumanising caste divide of a feudal society in his short story, Thakur Ka Kuan.
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The gender profile of the people defecating in the open is important because of two reasons. First, when a woman is forced (with no option left) to defecate in the open, it is a sign of the breakdown or even non-availability of the minimum civic structure that human development can expect from a society
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Second, a particular stand in rural as well as urban crime patterns of India has also suggested that going out for defecating has left many women vulnerable to sexual assaults.
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The more people you see squatting with bottles and polythene bags besides them, the more apparent become the faultlines of the skewed model of economic growth.