ABSTRACT
Building collectives of the poor and marginalised in urban settings has evolved as a powerful strategy for accessing basic urban services, including sanitation by underserved communities. This chapter focuses on the organisation building of poor and marginalised to meet their unmet sanitation needs and bring about social transformation by mobilising the collective voices of people in ways that they become part of the solutions. It demonstrates how social innovation in urban sanitation has embraced the idea of organisation building for the urban poor, especially to address the social inequality in accessing urban sanitation services, including the lack of safety and dignity for sanitation workers. Social innovations related to a much-neglected issue of manual scavenging have been spearheaded by the Safai Karmachari Andolan, which has evolved as an all-India movement committed to the abolition of the dehumanising practice of manual scavenging and dignified rehabilitation of those who have undertaken this work of physically removing untreated human excreta using most basic tools.
