“I live in a thatched roof tenement in a slum colony just outside Chennai’s city limits. We have a TV and a fan but we don’t have a toilet in our house. There is no space. I feel very uncomfortable but what to do?” says Arumugham, 26, and a domestic worker living in Chennai, India.

“We are a family of four - my husband, my widowed mother-in-law, my five-year-old daughter and me. We share one room between us and I have my kitchen in one corner. I am now eight months pregnant with my second baby.  I have to go out into the open to attend to the call of nature. There is some marshy land near the railway track and we all go there. About 200 of us live in this slum.  At least in the village where I come from, there was more open land and plants to hide behind.  Anyway, the women go only early in the morning or after dark. It is torture. Dirty and humiliating.”    

Degrading and Humiliating Conditions    

Nothing could sum up this situation more succinctly than the Talking Toilet report brought out by the National Slum Dwellers Federation Mahila Milan and Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC). According to the report, “Men, women and children in Indian cities are sitting by the millions, not in toilets at all, but along roadsides and railway tracks, on footpaths, in empty lots, between buildings, over drainage nalas, in makeshift privies of sticks and gunny sacking and in the dark in-between places which great cities are full of, in the early morning, late night or at high noon. They are shouted at, molested, exposed to indignities, dumped-on, insulted. Nobody would endure these things if they had a choice. For most, the choice of where to relieve themselves is not a choice at all, but a total lack of other options. Either no toilets are available, or if there are, they are in such bad shape that squatting in public becomes preferable.”    

Like in most critical issues, there is no paucity in legislation, only implementation.  In India, the British introduced the first sanitation bill in 1878. It made - or at least attempted to make - the construction of toilets compulsory even in huts of the then capital city of Calcutta. The Bill also proposed construction of public toilets at the cost of the neighboring houses. The Government of India’s Sanitation Act came about in 1993, making the dry latrine and its manual cleaning a punishable offence.  That, however, remains on paper.  700 million people still defecate in the open, sewerage facilities are available to no more than 30 per cent of the population in urban areas and only 3 percent of the rural population has access to flush latrines. An estimated six lakh scavengers in India work on 54 lakh service latrines, lifting night soil in the degrading practice of human scavenging.    

The reprehensible practice of human scavenging has its origin in the evolution of society itself.  In rural India, people generally defecated in open fields, with women using secluded places either surrounded by trees or partly covered with crops.  With increasing urbanization, those living in towns needed specified places for defecation, and therefore the need for the manual disposal of human excreta referred to as “night-soil” (a term that originated in Europe). In the traditional social order or caste system, the Bhangis (scavengers) were required to perform their job with hands and carry buckets of night soil on their heads through lanes and streets. It was about the worst kind of atrocity.  Scavengers are hated and shunned for this dirty job in what is a clear denial of social justice.  Scavenging has been abolished by law in free India since 1993, but the practice still continues in some parts of the country.    

The Costly Alternative    

Sewerage based toilets remain out of the reach of the majority of India’s population.  With growing urbanisation in developed and under-developed countries, different techniques have been adopted for the disposal of human waste. The most prevalent of these, in India, are the sewerage and septic tank systems.  But they are ecologically and economically unsustainable. In most of the urban areas, even on the street where sewers have been laid, houses have not been connected in spite of municipal laws making such connections compulsory. The sewerage system needs not only a sufficient quantity of running water, but also its regular supply for the waste disposal. Moreover, the cost involved in developing, constructing and maintaining the sewerage system are immense.     

As researcher Kalbermatten observes, “Among the fundamental problems of increasing sanitation services are the high cost of the conventional solution and the large number of people presently being without such service. A general estimate based on the existing per capita cost indicates that up to $500 billion would be needed for conventional (Western style) water supply and sewerage.  The per capita investment cost of the sewerage system alone ranges from $150-250, which is totally beyond the capacity of the beneficiaries in the developing countries to pay.”     

The subject of toilets is critically important because the lack of excremental hygiene is a national health hazard. Open defecation is responsible for breeding infectious germs not only in the places of disposal, but also by unwitting transfer through insects and flies. The challenge is to propagate and ensure installation of toilets that are affordable, upgradeable and easy to maintain.     

The internationally acclaimed Sulabh Sanitation Movement is one possible role model that is already a success story. Started by self-proclaimed “Action Sociologist” Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, Sulabh International has constructed and been maintaining over the last 25 years, more than 650,000 toilet cum bath complexes (including the largest one in the world at Shirdi) and 62 human excreta-based biogas plants. Declared one of the global best practices and conferred a special consultative status by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, Sulabh is accessible, affordable, self-sustaining and eco-friendly.     

A Catastrophe of Gargantuan Proportions    

Chennai city is just one example of the gargantuan nature of the issue.  267mld  (million liters per day) of sewage (partially treated/untreated) from six major sewage treatment plants and (untreated) from several pumping stations of the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board is discharged into the city’s waterways - the Adyar and Cooum rivers, the Otteri nullah and the Buckingham canal, which have become large, open sewage conduits over the years. This results mainly from malfunctioning of the system and inadequate maintenance of machinery. Besides this, sewer pipes illegally connected to storm water drains discharge untreated sewage into the waterways. Due to stagnant waters and the resultant breeding of disease causing germs and insects, several water-borne diseases have become a part of the daily lives of the people in Chennai. The city accounts for nearly 70% of the urban malarial cases in Tamil Nadu State. Thousands of slums and cattle sheds are perched on these very ‘river’ banks. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) has reported that the quality of water in the Cooum and Adyar rivers does not satisfy any of the criteria prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB).    

Says Founder of the Exnora International Civic Movement in the city, M.B. Nirmal, “We did a survey of pollution outfalls. Apart from the conspicuous rivers of gray water, the citizens were ignorant of the specific sources of pollution and what polluted the rivers. They realized that information gathering was the very first step to equipping themselves to fight the problem. We identified that no other than the very people living along these polluted rivers can relate to the issue. And so, a group of slum youth from Navalar Nagar was trained in surveying the waterways. This enthusiastic volunteer group walked every inch of the banks, enumerated and marked the pollution outfalls on the city map, and recorded the physical characteristics of the water as well. Water samples were collected and also tested for the chemical parameters.”    

The youth came up with maps of the waterways with pollution outfalls mapped and categorized according to their size, along with reports on the status of the waterways. This survey brought to light that there were 720 outfalls along the banks, while the government documents reported a much smaller number. The survey also countered a strongly held myth: that slums situated on the river banks contribute to most of the pollution, whereas, in reality, “the slums contributed to a mere 0.14% of the pollution, while 92% was contributed by the malfunctioning Sewage Pumping Stations and Treatment Plants.”     

Says Anbazhagan of the kuppam (fishing village) adjoining the posh suburb of Besant Nagar in the Southern part of the city, “The Jayalalithaa government, during its last term, spent crores of rupees to put up nice walkways along the entire beachfront for early morning walkers.  There are even fancy dustbins shaped like birds to put in their Coke cans and chips packets.  We have the Onyx (the Singapore based firm that was controversially awarded the contract for lifting solid waste off the city streets) fellows coming with impressive machines to sweep sands from the walkways. We see all this from our huts. We don’t even get tar roads into our kuppam. No drinking water supply. Not even toilets. But when we go to defecate in areas that were once just a part of our village, they say chi, chi (an expression of distaste). ‘See, how these fellows are dirtying our beach!’ What are we supposed to do?”      

Sources:

• “Talking Toilet” - National Slum Dwellers Federation Mahila Milan and Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).    

• “Sanitation - Convenience for a Few or Health for Many; the Report on the International Seminar on Low-Cost Techniques for Disposal of Human Wastes in Urban Communities, Calcutta, 1980” - J.M. Kalbermatten.    

• “A Sociological Study on the Abolition of Scavenging in India”: Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak/ 2003 reprint.    

• “Survey of Pollution Outfalls”: Exnora International with the Citizens Waterways Monitoring Programme.