Series: Corona Chronicles

Musings on the Community Toilet

By Manasi Ranade

On 24th March 2020, the Government of India, announced a nationwide lockdown and mandated strict orders to stay-at-home, with only essential services permitted to continue, to contain the pandemic. Instagram and Twitter, and probably Facebook are the so-called essentials for most of us. However, there are some who need to step out every day for some far more important essentials - toilets!

Our hardships in work from home and managing home without maids will pale if we look at their day. The house-help wakes up early, to reach before the long queues begin at the community toilet (CT) in her neighbourhood. It is a daily practice, pandemic or not. With a homemade mask on her face, she skips over the open gutter outside the gate, braves through the lobby and enters the third cubicle.

She knows this one is always relatively less dirty because the pan is broken, and one really needs to balance on it. Fortunately, the tap in this cubicle is intact. She has prayed all the way from home for water. She quickly places the bucket under the tap and is relieved to know that her prayers have been answered.

After finishing up she washes her hands with soap at the common tap outside. She wraps the soap in her handkerchief. It’s not yet sunrise! This gives plenty of time to return home and prepare meals for her family of five. She will have to step out again to get water (available for only a couple hours), very mindful that there are several other families waiting to use the same tap. Before the sun goes down, she will have to plan, for her second and likely the last trip for the day to the dreaded CT, and unfortunately this is true, even in the best of times.

A CT is ideally designed considering the density of population in the vicinity with about 25-35 persons per seat as the standard (CPHEEO). However, given the population density (Dharavi is 30 times denser than NYC which is the densest city in the USA) we often find these facilities functioning at more than the maximum capacity. The users become susceptible to infections due to multiple users and lack of clean water and disinfectants, poor ventilation and unclean surroundings and irregular operations & maintenance (O&M). Physical distancing becomes a luxury when you have 10 or more people sharing the bare minimum of four walls and a roof, we call home, and when each visit to the toilet is a mission to be accomplished. Often, the existing facilities are vandalised rendering them useless.  

What makes a community toilet even more vulnerable is that it also serves the community for other activities such as bathing, clothes washing and handwashing, as water at home is for drinking and cooking purpose only. Poor experience of using CT poses the danger of relapse of open defecation. This is especially true, in slums where multiple rows of single room-large family houses (single rooms that function as the B, H and K) are set between narrow alleys, share toilets outside in the vicinity called Community Toilets.

The Swachh Bharat Mission has introduced several positive and noteworthy changes in the ambit of sanitation in our country. According to Census 2011, in Urban India, across 4041 statutory towns, close to 80 lakh households had no access to toilet and would defecate in the open (MoHUA, 2017). Under this mission, in Urban India over 60 lakh individual household latrines have been constructed (MoHUA, SBM Urban, 2020). The number of people who now have their own toilets has increased, reducing the dependence on community toilets, however, public toilets remain a necessity. Data also suggests that in Urban India we have over 3 lakh Community Toilet seats and over 2.5 lakh Public toilet seats (MoHUA, SBM Urban, 2020). Under this mission Community and Public toilet facilities have undergone a facelift - upgraded equipment, new toilet pans, water tanks, improved signage and beautification using wall paintings, landscaping.  However, are those enough to tackle the virus?

Although the experience of using CTs may be unpleasant, they exist for the purpose of achieving public sanitation. Without these facilities, people would be forced to defecate in the open putting them to greater risks of health, safety, and dignity. This pandemic is proof how each decision can lead to different outcomes for different people.

Would people resort to open defecation again amidst the pandemic due to unhygienic and unsanitary conditions in these toilets? Would one feel safer to go out rather than bumping into someone at the toilet? These are the pressing questions in times of the pandemic.

Public Toilets (PT) share a similar fate. PT is available for use by all, either free or at a nominal charge and is generally situated at places where there is a gathering of people such as transport hubs, marketplaces, shopping streets, commercial centres, or along highways, etc. We have all experienced the deplorable conditions of most of these facilities. Broken pans, leaking taps, little or no water, no soap, damaged lights, sewage overflowing out of the gutter is a common sight for most. Most of us avoid using the public toilets or use it only when necessary. However, there are many for whom it is still a daily ritual despite the pandemic - truck drivers, vegetable vendors, delivery personnel, shopkeepers, to name a few.

Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus underequipped public, community toilets, and a creaky sanitation system. The issue at hand in this pandemic is majorly twofold - physical distancing and regular safe handwashing.  This pandemic is an opportunity to re-look at and redesign public sanitation and specifically CT and PT and move towards a humane society.

About the Author:

Manasi Ranade is an Architect and Urban Manager who has worked in the sanitation sector for the last 4 years, largely under the Swachh Bharat Mission.

Illustration Credits:

Pragya Chauhan