http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/mapping-toilets-in-a-mumbai-slum-yields-unexpected-results/?src=twrhp...
While a recent movement has sprung up over getting the government to provide more free public toilets, in Cheeta Camp, the Harvard students found that most people preferred the pay toilets. Unlike the free public toilets, the pay ones, which were generally provided by a nongovernmental organization, had water, electric light and were kept cleaner than government-run facilities — well worth their 1 or 2 rupee (2 or 3 U.S. cents) cost.
In the old days, women would avoid the public toilets entirely, said Aminabi Mohd Abdul Farah, an 80-year-old grandmother of six who has been at Cheeta Camp since 1976. “The ladies would go in the jungle, they were too scared to go to the toilet,” which was little more than a hut. “It was unsafe. People were scared.”
The new facilities, built in her neighborhood about five years ago, are a huge improvement, she said. “There is water, light, everything so we don’t have any problem. Why get scared?”
The fact that poor people are willing to pay for cleaner, safer toilets belies the typical portrait of the poor as helpless victims. The clean pay toilets seem to have made a difference: “Now we don’t have to spend so much on doctors. Previously we had to struggle a lot, but now are happier,” said Kanis Sayyed Hashim, a 45-year-old mother who has lived in the slum for 26 years and said her children get sick less now that they use the pay toilets.
Pay or no, small children do not generally use any of the toilet facilities, finding them too big, messy and intimidating. Instead, they generally do their business in the open, directly into sewers or near drains. Some slums have toilet facilities built for small children, but there are none in Cheeta Camp yet.
The lack of basic services in Cheeta Camp is typical of Indian slums. Despite India’s economic boom, most government services created in recent years help the “better-off population of city dwellers,” according to a report in the journal Economic and Political Weekly on sanitation problems in the slums. Corruption and lack of accountability for officials are pervasive problems.
Governments are often loath to even officially acknowledge slum dwellers, because it would imply they should then receive basic infrastructure, said Dr. Patil-Deshmukh, executive director of Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research, a Mumbai urban research and advocacy organization.
By mapping the locations and functionality of the toilets, the students were echoing a process that had been used by slum dwellers organizations in India to force government to act. The act of naming streets, counting citizens and mapping facilities turns information into an advocacy tool.
The students have given the map to local nongovernmental organizations and the medical director of Cheeta Camp’s health center, “who seemed pleased to have a better map of the camp and thought the toilet information would be helpful,” said Rosemary Wyber, one of the Harvard team. When the map is finalized, they will present it to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, the city’s governing body.
“The first thing we heard when we arrived was that there wasn’t enough space to build new toilets,” said Jennifer Weaver, another of the Harvard students. Once their map was finished, she said, they “could that show that of 46 toilet blocs, eight did not work. So why not fix those toilets?”
