JOIN USBuilding ‘informal squatter islands’ are the solution to India’s sanitation enigma.
Unlike many of you, I'm getting convinced that we may have run out of ideas to get everyone to shit inside a toilet. The sheer number of toilets required for the country to
attain some level of decency would be in excess of 300 million, assuming that a family of five takes turn to use the same loo.
The number will continue to grow rather endlessly – as population grows exponentially, as families break into smaller units and as households migrate in search of new opportunities. I suspect if a Toilet Ministry, working 24x7, can achieve such rolling targets!
But why are we stuck to a toilet as the only option, the absence of which favours the foreign tourists with some stinking photo opportunity? Unlike the West, toilets for a vast majority that survives on less than $2 a day may not be a good idea. For them, easing in public seems a democratic decree.
It has worked thus far and mark my words, it will sustain during our lifetime for sure. Because public empathy towards squatting has remained secular, never did it trigger any class or caste strife in matter of appropriating public space for conducting private action.
Shit, in itself, may not be a problem. Left on its own, it engages millions of microbes in enriching the soil with organic carbon. The moment it comes in contact with water, something that a toilet facilitates, the trouble starts.
Each water body, be it a pond or a river, gets an undesired share of floating excreta at various stages of decomposition which proves fatal to some half a million children below the age of five on account of water-borne disea-ses. And nowhere does this piece of statistics suggest that all these deaths are caused due to the scourge of open defecation!
With its extensive paraphernalia, the toilet makes unreasonable demand on increasingly scarce public resource – water – which not only limits its spread but amplifies the sanitation crises too. The solution to India’s sanitation enigma rests in recognising ‘informal squatter islands’ as permanent municipal spaces where individual waste will get managed in a way that produces subjectivity than shame.
The state’s role will then be limited to aesthetically managing such islands, upturning the soil periodically and getting it ready for next volume of bowel discharge before it is sold at a premium to the real estate builders.
Like ‘nude beaches’ elsewhere in the world, we can call such islands ‘butt parks.’