Frontiers | Water, Sanitation, and Social Justice: Religion, Gender, and Caste in South Asia’s Sanitation Systems

About this Research Topic

This Research Topic is currently accepting articles, but is closing soon.

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Background

Sanitation service delivery in South Asia is embedded within complex social, cultural, and economic structures shaped by caste, religion, and gender. Historically, the labour of maintaining water and sanitation infrastructure has been relegated to communities stigmatised as “untouchable,” reinforcing purity-pollution hierarchies and sustaining generational occupational segregation in the water sector. Religious identity often compounds this marginalisation, shaping unequal access to water and sanitation services, employment, and legal protections. Gender further intensifies inequities, as women and gender-diverse sanitation workers face unsafe working conditions around water infrastructure and heightened vulnerability while maintaining systems they are often denied equitable access to. Rapid urbanisation and large-scale missions such as Swachh Bharat and Jal Jeevan have expanded water and sanitation infrastructure but have not dismantled the structural barriers that determine who delivers, maintains, and benefits from these systems. This Research Topic examines these intersections as a problem of water governance and justice, bringing visibility to how caste, religion, and gender shape access to, delivery of, and control over water and sanitation services in South Asia.

All submissions must explicitly connect their analysis to water or sanitation service delivery, access, quality, or governance outcomes. Manuscripts addressing labor conditions, identity, or policy without a direct link to water systems fall outside the scope of this Research Topic and the Water and Human Systems section.

We accept papers including but not limited to those that:
• Examine how caste-based occupational segregation and purity-pollution norms shape who delivers and maintains water and sanitation services.
• Analyze how religious identity and gender deepen exclusion from equitable water access, sanitation employment, and service governance.
• Assess the limits of water and sanitation policy frameworks in confronting structural inequities in service delivery and infrastructure access.
• Document grassroots narratives and worker-led resistance that reshape water and sanitation governance and justice.
• Bridge critical water governance scholarship with WASH practice, advancing participatory and just approaches to service delivery.

We welcome manuscripts that engage with the intersections of religion, gender, and caste in water and sanitation systems in South Asia, provided each submission grounds its analysis in water or sanitation service access, delivery, quality, or governance.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

Brief Research Report
Community Case Study
Conceptual Analysis
Data Report
Editorial
FAIR² Data
General Commentary
Hypothesis and Theory
Methods

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Keywords: Sanitation Labour, Caste and Untouchability, Gendered Inequalities, Religious Stigma and Social Exclusion in South Asia

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.