Sanitising the Poor
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.