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Themes > Current Issues
21.02.2006

Sanitising the Poor

Jayati Ghosh

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.

 

© MACROSCAN 2006