User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in India

Public toilets in India are often located in train stations or bus stations. They are not very clean, with women mostly being responsible for cleaning though in some cases Dalit cleaners are used. Public toilets play an important role in ending open defecation, which continues to be practiced despite attempts to end it through building toilet infrastructure.

Public toilets
The local word for public toilet is WC.

Public toilets, especially those in bus stations, train stations and on trains, are often very unclean. The cleaning of public toilets, both men's and women's toilets, is done by women. Toilet paper is rarely provided as people are expected to use water to clean themselves instead as using water is viewed as more hygienic that using paper. In some places, this means there is a jug of water next to the toilet for that purpose. The left hand is used instead of the right had to keep the right clean for eating. In more upscale and Western style toilets, there are hand held hoses attached to the toilet that can be used to clean intimate areas. Full services public toilets in India often require payment to use. It cost around 1 rupee to use many public toilets in India. For a family of six, this could easily result in a monthly expenditure of R180 if each member only used the toilet just once a day.

Sulabh International is a project dedicated to improving public toilets and educating local populations on the importance of maintaining these facilities. There have been cases in India where Dalits have been intentionally assigned as the only cleaners of public toilets. This created situations situations by design where the Dalits and the public toilets both became viewed as impure, and other castes would not use them. The cleaning of public toilets, both men's and women's toilets, is done by women.

History
In 1878, the British government passed a law saying that public toilet financing would come from a pay and use model. This did not work as the public toilets were generally not maintained, smelly and dirty, even with users paying to use them.

The Sulabh Shauchalaya Latrine was introduced in 1970.

The first modern public pay toilets arrived in India in the 1970s.

It cost around USD$0.02 to use a public toilet in 2007.

Public toilets appeared in the 2008 film that won the Oscar for best picture, Slumdog Millionaire.

Around 3.2% of the population of India in 2011 relied exclusively on public toilets.

SaniShop is a program created by the World Toilet Organization to empower local entrepreneurs and improve local toilet access by encouraging them to sell household latrines. Local masons are trained by SaniShop and provided with supplies to install the latrines in countries like Cambodia, India and Mozambique. Since 2012, the program has trained 550 local masons and resulted in the creation of 20,000 household latrine toilets.

Open defecation and toilet access
In 2011, around 49.8% of the country's population practices open defecation. In 2017, open defecation remained common in India, with people often going to the toilet on railway tracks or in open fields. Over 600 million people, around half the population, openly defecated in in the early 2000. Most of this population lived in rural India, where there was some cultural opposition to the present of a toilet in the home, where people used the same building to cook or pray. This had health consequences as human waste contains bacteria, viruses and other parasites. On a daily basis in 2016, 41 million people in urban areas had to resort to public urination and defecation because of lack of access to public toilets. They generated enough waste to fill eight Olympic sized swimming pools every day. Open defecation in rural areas remained a problem in India in 2019 despite a massive 60 month program started in 2013 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi called "Clean India" to construct 100 million toilets. These toilets used a open pits, where the bottom had a pipe that sent waste from that pit to second pit. Women are vulnerable to violence when practicing open defecation. This potential for violence creates a viscous circle that suggests women should not be visible.

Only 46.9% of India's population had toilets in their residences in 2011, while at the same time 63.2% had phones in their residences. WaterAid ranked the country as one of the ten worst in the world in 2016 for urban access to safe and private toilets. 157 million urban dwellers in India lacked access to safe and private toilets in 2016. That year, WaterAid ranked India the worst country in the world for having the most urban-dwellers living without access to a safe, private toilet. While private household toilets increased from 37% in 2014 to 71% in 2018, around 25% of people who had private household toilets continued to openly defecate. Some Indians use bath mugs to clean themselves after defecating. Others have adapted and use toilet paper. Indians started using western style sit toilets after exclusively using squat toilets for a long time.

Prime Minister Modi pledged to spend USD$29 billion to build 120 million toilets in rural India as part of his goal to end open defecation by 2 October 2019. From 2013 to 2019, the introduction of additional toilets in private homes resulted in many young people stopping the practice of open defecation. The Asian Development Bank started working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2013 on improving fecal sludge management, including investing in non-sewered sanitation projects, in a number of countries including India.

Women's toilets
Lack of access to adequate sanitation in the 2000s and 2010s left women particularly vulnerable to gender violence. 355 million women in India in 2018 lacked access to basic sanitation.

Toilet inequality between men and women has been a major issue in Indian feminism. Women have fewer public toilets for use in Mumbai than men. Women in Mumbai are also more likely to have to pay to access public toilets than men. The government in Mumbai and Pune led projects to create public toilets in slum areas of these cities. Their designed turned out to be problematic as the designed discouraged women from using them. This included having entrances that were directly facing the street, making it obvious the purpose of the visit, and having male and female stalls facing each other. Mahila Milan and and the National Federation of Slum Dwellers worked to try to solve the issue of lack of female use of these toilets, doing so by first consulting women in these communities. The consultation also involved asking cleaners how to better improve these toilets, which resulted in some improvements to their design.

Andhra Pradesh State
Since October 2016, the city of Visakhapatnam and its population of 2 million people have been open defecation free. This came about because of efforts by Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation who mapped out where people were practicing open defecation, finding out why their practices open defecations and the relation of these practices to existing infrastructure like public and community toilets. The city then upgraded 198 public toilet facilities with over 4,000 total toilet seats. The government made sure that these facilities addressed the specific needs of girls and women. As a result, there was high uptake among women in the city.

Bihar State
There were 870 cases of rape in 2012 in the state of Bihar that were related to sanitation, including in public toilets or while practicing open defecation.

Chhattisgarh
In Gorba, there are open squat toilets. These were cement slabs with porcelain squat bowls embedded in the slab. They did not have any walls or means of ensuring privacy.

Chennai
There were public toilets in Chennai in 2017.

Kerala
There are not many public toilets in Kerala outside of major cities. Those that do exist tend to be found in train and bus stations, and in cafes, restaurants and hotels. Many public toilets tend to be very dirty with few facilities.

Kohima
The CDPO Chozuba assessed public toilets in local villages in Chozuba in September 2018.

Maharashtra
Women have fewer public toilets for use in Mumbai than men. Women in Mumbai are also more likely to have to pay to access public toilets than men.

The government in Mumbai and Pune led projects to create public toilets in slum areas of these cities. Their designed turned out to be problematic as the designed discouraged women from using them. This included having entrances that were directly facing the street, making it obvious the purpose of the visit, and having male and female stalls facing each other. Mahila Milan and and the National Federation of Slum Dwellers worked to try to solve the issue of lack of female use of these toilets, doing so by first consulting women in these communities. The consultation also involved asking cleaners how to better improve these toilets. The latter consultation led to stall doors that opened both inwards and outwards to make cleaning easier.

The Samagra maintained community toilets in Pune were very dysfunctional for a long time. After the government decided that this issue needed to be addressed, the company came up with a goal of creating facilities that did not attract vandalism, were safe to use and easy to maintain. The toilets were eventually upgraded to have bigger windows, have improved ventilation and be equipped with better tools for cleaning them. Samagra also trained attendants and provided them with health care. The company also allowed attendants to supplement their income by selling items at the community toilets. Samagra found alternative means to supplement their income when running community toilets by doing things like advertising, offering different services and offering different payment options.

A woman died in 2015 in Maharashtra Nagar in a 22-seat public toilet because of a poor constructed concrete slab collapsed.

National Capital Region
In places like rural New Delhi in 2015, farmers might construct temporary make-shift toilets at the edge of their fields to prevent open defecation.

While a sewage system was laid out in the East Delhi informal settlement of Sundernagari in 1983, it was never functional. Despite repeated requests from the government, no action was taken well into the 2000s. As a result, people were forced to use public toilets instead of using toilets in their residences, which led to a number of women being attacked.

Rajastan
The national government funded a project in Rajastan to empower women through the construction of household toilets. This was done because many women in the state tried to hold their need to pee until night time, when they would then use community toilets. Many women refused to participate in assisting in selecting here household toilets were built, which resulted in most being built in parts of the home used only by men and guests. Consequently, many women did not use these household toilets. Adjustments were made to the project to try to build more household toilets in places in the home that women could use.

As a result of the covid pandemic, public toilets were closed across India. This was problematic in places like Jaipur where only 51.27% of households had a toilet as part of their residence. Women particularly suffered in Jaipur during the pandemic when they had their periods and could not access public toilets.

Residents in rural villages in places like Rajasthan received a USD$200 subsidy from the "Clean India" program to build a private latrine. Subsidy distribution was uneven, with some people applying and not receiving the subsidy. A consequence of this was people started to visit other people's homes to use their toilets, in situations here many families might end up using one private toilet.

Tamil Nadu
Trichy had public toilets serving low-income communities in 2017. These were initially run by  Swachh Bharat Mission. They in part trained people through local women's cooperatives to operate, maintain and finance the toilets. As a result of charging a small fee, the toilets have been able to continue to operate. Their success encouraged more of these toilets to be built, and ultimately resulted in the toilets going from being a community run facility to public facilities that served workers in the communities where they were located.

Telangana State
Hyderabad, with a population of around six million, only had 186 public toilets in the mid-2010s, distributed unequally and furthering inequality in the city.

A sanitation assessment was done in Warangal to determine the level of open defecation in the city, trying to locate the most commonly used sites in the urban core. After identifying many locations, especially near public entities like hospitals and government buildings, the government invited companies to bid to install build-operate-transfer public toilets on allocated land. Companies that won their bids had their public toilets routinely scrutinized, with failure to maintain their facilities resulting in a loss of operating rights. This led to the creation of around 60 new public toilet facilities in the city, with the city requiring little capital investment to run them.

Greater Warangal Municipal Corporation (GWMC) in Telangana, India built 38 public toilets with the goal of trying to stop open defecation and urination in high density areas. The toilet facilities included toilet seats, urinals, facilities for hand washing, soap and facilities to bathe. Despite decreases in public defecation, the uptake among women was lower than men. Women in the state said they did not use them because some had male caretakers, some lacked women only blocks, there was not enough privacy, they preferred to squat rather than sit, there was a lack of places to dispose of sanitary pads. Consequently, the government in Warangal responded by building four public toilets that were designed specifically for women.

By law, petrol stations in Warangal  are required to provide toilets that are free to customers and local residents. A year after this law came into effect, around 20 petrol stations had installed new toilets that served their communities at little cost to the city government.

Around 63% of Warangal's female residents have indicated to the city in a survey that they prefer female-only toilets, and that public toilets have separate entrances for men and for women. 72% of the female residents surveyed also expressed a preference for female caretakers for women's toilets. They survey also found women were less likely to use public toilets if there was a crowd of men around an entrance, if the toilets did not do an adequate job of providing privacy, if the facilities were not clean and if the caretaker behaved in certain ways.

A survey of Warangal residents toilet preferences by the municipal government found that most residents were not willing to walk more than 5 minutes to access a toilet. If it took longer than that, they were likely to engage in open defecation.

After hearing back from residents in their survey, the Warangal municipal government made a number of changes. The first was that they modified their contracts with existing public toilet providers to require facilities be changed to have separate entrances for men and women, and that a certain number of toilets be designated for use by women.

Local residents in Hyderabad often found themselves frustration by nongovernmental organizations and community organizations projects around public toilet and sanitation projects in the 2000s. This was in large part because after the initial funding for the project ran its course, there was little to no ongoing support to continue projects and maintain infrastructure created in support of them.

Uttar Pradesh
At the Kasturba Gandhi Junior Residential School in 2017, a school warden became irate after discovering menstrual blood in a public toilet at the school. The warden made seven girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen strip naked in front of their classmates as they attempted to discover who left the blood on the bathroom door.

There were few public toilets in Ambedkar Nagar. Those that did exist also served nearby settlements and often had long queues. Women had few choices but to wait, while men and children instead engaged in open defecation. These toilets were not cleaned properly and were plagued by insects. Cleaning might only take place every second of third day despite large amounts of users. The facilities for men were also better maintained those for women.

Regional and global situation impacting public toilets in India
Public toilet access around the world is most acute in the Global South, with around 3.6 billion people, 40% of the world's total population, lacking access to any toilet facilities. 2.3 people in the the Global South do not have toilet facilities in their residence. Despite the fact that the United Nation made a declaration in 2010 that clean water and sanitation is a human right, little has been done in many places towards addressing this on a wider level.

Many schools around the world in 2018 did not have toilets, with the problem particularly acute in parts of Africa and Asia. Only one in five primary schools on earth had a toilet and only one in eight secondary schools had public toilets. An issue in developing countries is toilet access in schools. Only 46% of schools in developing countries have them.

Public toilets, depending on their design, can be tools of social exclusion. Western public toilet standards including privatization and limited opening hours disadvantage women when implemented in countries in the Far East. Western style sit toilets are more popular among the emerging middle and upper class around the world.