Fascinating read by Max Bearak in the New York Times’ India Ink blog, which describes a new law passed a month ago banning unhygienic “dry toilets”, which require manual cleaning mostly by poor Dalit women who are often forced to do the demeaning work by societal pressure and face significant discrimination.

While sponsoring politicians are quick to claim the success of the new law, which requires destruction of dry toilets and entitles workers to compensation, activists claim that the rules lack teeth by not specifying how those women can be rehabilitated and how much they are entitled to [India Ink]

Perhaps unsurprisingly The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, dealing as it does with the unglamorous issue of human waste, seems to have received no other English language media coverage whatsoever since having been passed, as far as Legally India could tell [Read the Act (PDF 135KB)]