A matter of public convenience
K. BALAKESARI
LOCATED NEAR a traffic intersection, which I pass regularly, is one of a chain of public toilets set up all over the country by an NGO. It has a decent exterior and is maintained in an exemplarily clean condition. The users pay a nominal amount. There is a regular flow of citizens. Nothing extraordinary, except that many of those using the facility probably have no access to a modern toilet in their own dwellings.
If the Green Revolution was the outstanding achievement of the sixties and seventies to feed our country's burgeoning population, I dare say that setting up of these toilets by the NGO is a no less significant but unsung landmark. Yet, it seems there is hardly any coordinated effort or policy to carry forward the good work.
We may preen ourselves as an emerging IT super power and aspire to become a knowledge-based society (whatever that means), yet we may also have the largest number of people relieving themselves in the open, with almost 70 per cent of the population at present having no toilets in their homes.
Due to a combination of historical, economic, climatic and social factors, we seem to have gravitated to a system that still predominantly depends on Mother Nature to deal with the matter. Unfortunately, this has also perpetuated the absolutely degrading practice of manual scavenging.
Another fallout of the lack of adequate sanitation, rather peculiar to this country, is the tendency to relieve oneself in public places.
The problem is no doubt linked to a lack of adequate and affordable housing to a large section of our population on the one hand and the explosive growth of slums in urban areas on the other.
Even so, it is doubtful if there is any coherent policy either at the Centre or in the States to view this as an urgent public health issue and to provide adequate facilities in the public domain till a majority of our population has access to housing with toilet facilities. I have yet to come across any political party addressing this issue in its manifesto. But then, building and inaugurating toilets does not grab headlines as much as distribution of freebies or opening of yet another IT park or a swanky mall.
Toilets require water. In a country with unequal distribution of that resource and a general climate of shortage, should there not be a national policy on water use laying down priorities to different sectors such as for drinking, agriculture, sanitation and only lastly, for items of avoidable nature such as soft drinks?
Our inability to handle our own waste adequately is only one aspect a larger issue. With the steady growth of GDP, the problem of dealing with the huge volumes of industrial and electronic waste, mostly toxic, also looms large. Like GDP, should there not be an index like Gross Domestic Waste (GDW) to monitor and deal with the fallout of our increasingly consumerist society?
Indeed, the humble `public convenience' has a number of profound messages to a fast developing economy like ours, if only we care to heed them.
balakesari@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Open Page
