Going Beyond the Bowl to Achieve Gen­der Equal­ity in Sanitation

Archana Patkar received her MSc in Social Pol­icy in 1994 from the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and Polit­i­cal Sci­ence (LSE). She also holds an MA in French Stud­ies from Jawa­har­lal Nehru Uni­ver­sity and was the Founder and Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Junc­tion Social, located in the greater Mum­bai Area from June 1998 to Feb­ru­ary 2010 (11 years 9 months). She has been a pro­gram man­ager at the WSSCC since 2010.

In her work, she has called upon water, san­i­ta­tion and hygiene (WASH) experts, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, donors, aca­d­e­mics and activists to treat access to Water San­i­ta­tion and Hygiene (WaSH) as a human right. She has argued that the absence of access to WASH is one of the ways through which inequal­ity and exclu­sion is main­tained par­tic­u­larly when it comes to vul­ner­a­ble and mar­gin­alised groups. She has said that, "It is our col­lec­tive, human respon­si­bil­ity to medi­ate and mod­er­ate this inequal­ity and not doing so actively is tan­ta­mount to indulging in discrimination."