There have been plans, implemented or merely on paper, over providing toilets for everyone. Yet, we continue to have open defecation not because people want to go out into the open but often because there is no alternative (the infamous TINA).
The problem seems to be that no one wants to think this through; building toilets is probably the easiest part in a tangled issue. Waste has to be treated, managed and all too often is disposed indiscriminately, polluting the soil and water, leading to an increase in the incidence of waterborne diseases. All of which has an economic cost that all of us bear.
The other aspects of water supply; to clean said toilets, catering for the reality that water is going to be ever-scarcer so the minimal amount needed…are issues that probably need a much more localised solution than grafting a model relevant for another sensibility and culture.
Adding to the technological aspects of a solution is that major hurdle: cost. The cost of installation, maintenance (including collection and disposal of waste) and who is going to foot the bill for the maintenance. If the solution is a community-based toilet block, say one toilet block per so many people, then that community must take ownership of that block, hence pay at least some part of the cost of its maintenance.
Maintenance has to be the responsibility of the users as they used to in the lower income chawls of Mumbai where toilets were located at either end of the landing and all households used them. I don’t mean that they clean the toilets themselves (they could, but…) but someone’s got to.
The one experiment the civic body tried, almost three decades ago, of installing what was then fashionable, biogas units at a small group of homes with a community toilet near the collector’s office, went kaput because no one wanted to take responsibility for it. Its maintenance should have been the responsibility of the beneficiaries, the residents who benefited for the toilets. They didn’t.
That is the other critical issue: public property is no one’s responsibility. Government has to do everything, that old `mai-baap sarkar’ ideology.
On a recent visit to a popular shrine where the temple board has installed toilets every 500 metres of the way (the shrine attracted 1 crore visitors last year; so the board has only met a necessity) yet parents encouraged their children to squat by the wayside. Puneri that I am, I couldn’t resist ticking off the parents for inculcating bad habits in their children. Water off a duck’s back was all the effect I had as they stared at me blankly.
Back in Pune: there was to have been a community-based toilet, run initially on a pilot basis, in select localities using modern methodologies for the collection, disposal, etc. of waste and a minimal use of water. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have got off the ground because there is no information available on its status.
The cost to the national exchequer through a lack of toilets for all, from health to natural resources, is well documented. International goals, like the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, had laid out a road map: public toilets for all by 2015. Well, that date’s come and almost gone without the target having been achieved.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan may also come and go, as the earlier government-backed programme, Nirmal Gram Abhiyaan, did unless this becomes a social movement. For that, more of us need to get involved so that when we ask people to use a toilet, we don’t get blank looks.It’s my country, too.
Source : Pune Mirror
