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I live in a university campus in the heart of South
Delhi. Delhi is the richest state of India in terms
of per capita income, the city of Delhi is the most
rapidly growing in material terms and the residents
of South Delhi in particular are perceived of as being
especially well off. Of course, just as everything else
in India, the average conceals a welter of contradictions
and disparities. Increasingly, these disparities relate
to problems of access that the middle classes have stopped
thinking about, even though they directly affect the
quotidian life of every human being. Basic sanitation
is one such issue.
Just outside my campus, off a busy road and wedged between
a middle class housing colony and a shopping centre,
there is a slum settlement. At first appearance, this
particular slum, like so many others in Delhi that have
come up within the ''urban villages'' or are squatters’
colonies that have been regularised over time, looks
reasonably affluent. The houses may be tiny and matchbox
sized, but they are pukka structures, often several
stories high. Television cables and telephone lines
create bizarre patterns in the air, looping and entangling
with electric wires. Many, if not most, households have
televisions and some have air coolers. The electronic
bleeping of cell phones mingles with the sound of children
playing and the hiss of pressure cookers.
Yet none of the homes has got a toilet within the house.
All the residents of this slum use the common public
lavatories that are located near a large drain - or
else they use the drain itself. Since there are only
four toilets for several hundred families, the conditions
in these public lavatories are predictably horrendous.
In any case, since running water is available only for
two hours in the morning and again for two hours in
the evening, the tanks empty very rapidly thereafter.
So flushing away faeces and detritus is a luxury that
is unavailable for most of the day and for most of the
residents.
However, these residents are among the luckier ones.
In many slum colonies of Delhi and the surrounding areas,
the public toilets are not free, but must be paid for
(typically Rs. 2 per use), and water for bathing or
washing clothes must also be purchased (usually Rs.
5 per bucket). For poor working class families this
is an extraordinarily large amount that dramatically
erodes the household budget on a daily basis, which
is why many of them try to minimise such payments by
regularly ensuring that children and even other household
members, defaecate onto drains, or in clearings or any
other space available. Personal ablutions are necessarily
performed with as little water as possible, often at
the cost of basic cleanliness.
Incidentally, this charging for sanitation facilities
and water does not necessarily mean that the quality
of the water or of the public facilities gets any better.
In the Bawana resettlement colony (where several thousand
families who used to live in the Yamuna Pushta area
have been relocated) there are only six toilet complexes
(of six toilets each) to serve around eight thousand
households. Obviously, these inadequate facilities are
under severe pressure, and they are consequently overcrowded,
indescribably filthy and very unhealthy. Yet there is
no alternative for the people who live there, except
for simply using public space to relieve oneself.
The same story is repeated all over Delhi. In the midst
of the six-lane avenues, the spanking and glittering
new shopping malls and the luxury office buildings,
much of the working class lives crowded into haphazard
tenements with only the most rudimentary - and often
nonexistent - sanitation. It is not only the periodic
shortages of water that constitute the problem, it is
the absolute inadequacy of basic infrastructure: minimally
clean toilets, modern plumbing, access to enough water
to ensure personal hygiene.
What is true of Delhi is probably even more true of
other metro cities and large towns which are not even
recognised as being ''special'' in the same way as the
capital city. Across urban India, the lack of basic
sanitation is not only unfair and appalling, it also
speaks of a public health disaster that is simply waiting
to happen. Terrible sanitary conditions have huge negative
externalities - that is to say, they adversely affect
not only those who are forced to use them, but also
others and society in general, because of the more easy
spread of communicable diseases.
Forget, for a moment, what this tells us about the attitudes
of our elites and upper middle classes, who simply cannot
be bothered how everyone else lives. Consider, more
significantly, what this tells us about urban planning
in India. We have on paper a very elaborate system of
urban planning and regulation, which has of course most
frequently been honoured in the breach when it comes
to practice. The current and extremely convoluted legal
mess with respect to regularisation or demolition of
commercial buildings and other unauthorised structures
reflects this only too well.
But surely urban planners should be concerned not only
with preventing unauthorised structures, but also with
ensuring that the basic facilities, especially sanitation,
are provided to all residents? The city of Delhi, for
example, is remarkably poorly endowed with public toilets
even in commercial areas, and the expansion of the Sulabh
Shouchalaya system in recent years has still not been
enough to fill the huge need.
In the places inhabited by the poor, these problems
are exacerbated. And because of shortage, even public
lavatory facilities become arenas for further exploitation
of the poor (often by the slightly less poor) and further
oppression of women. The gender dimension of having
inadequate public toilets should be obvious in general.
But in residential spaces, the lack of secure and private
places to bathe and perform daily ablutions becomes
a source of daily harassment and even actual physical
danger for women and girls.
How long does all this have to go on before people say
they have had enough? Why do our courts, who are so
quick to pronounce on various public matters such as
polluting units in residential areas or demonstrations
impeding traffic, not take up this pressing and urgent
issue of providing basic sanitation in urban areas?
Surely there is a case for public interest litigation
in pursuance of this most basic of human rights (or
needs).
Why do our urban planners not put the need to ensure
adequate toilet facilities for all residents ahead of
the desire to have yet another shopping mall? If there
is a perceived demand for yet another luxury shopping
complex, surely this is perceived as such only because
our media have glorified these demands. Why does this
same media not highlight the huge predicament of ordinary
people who each day face the problem of having nowhere
to relieve themselves?
Can we not raise the simple demand that the first priority
of municipal spending should be to ensure adequate and
regularly cleaned public toilets with adequate water
supply in residential areas and commercial complexes?
Would it be unreasonable to ask that the next round
of fancy shopping malls should be constructed only after
this minimum facility has been provided to all the city’s
residents?
Given the power structure in society and the priorities
of our elites, perhaps even such simple suggestions
would be taken seriously only if they come along with
some perception that this would also affect the elites.
Maybe the only way we can get some recognition of this
is to ask for Cabinet meetings and conclaves of higher
bureaucrats to be held rotationally in slum areas without
prior notice, and force our leaders to use those lavatory
facilities themselves, so that they too would realise
the broader public health implications of this neglect.
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