Flushed with pride

Whose volunteers run a class for school dropouts. Who have guided residents of an adjacent middle-class colony to organise themselves for locality management and, in partnership with the latter, launched a zero-garbage drive based on segregation of dry and wet garbage at source and recycling of waste into wealth. Who have used this partnership to erase the social divide between ‘‘slum people’’ and ‘‘building people’’.

You must see this community toilet in Santacruz, run by an NGO called the Triratna Prerana Mandal. It’s a toilet that is much more than a toilet.

THE introduction was from Seema Redkar, an official of the municipal corporation who has two decades of experience in community mobilisation for sanitation. I had interacted with her during my PMO days when, together with the Ministry of Urban Development, we were designing the Valmiki-Ambedkar Yojana (VAMBAY) for slum improvement.

Usually it’s not difficult to locate a community toilet in a slum. You are led by the fetid smell. But here I was, standing right in front of the toilet block in a slum nestled in the middle of a housing colony called TPS 6 (Town Planning Scheme No. 6), and yet couldn’t make out that I was there.

What I saw instead was a well-maintained mini-garden that served as the frontage for a double-storied structure that looked least like a toilet block. It had 12 seats each for men and women, and six seats for children. It also had three bathing units. All of them were clean, well-lit and and odourless.

‘‘We have employed three persons for day-and-night cleaning and maintenance,’’ says Dayanand Jadhav, the Mandal’s president, a bespectacled, thinly-built, 30-something person whose face radiates commitment. ‘‘We provide water inside the toilets, so that our people don’t have to carry water-filled pitchers from home, which is a common sight in slums. We believe that toilet is not only a matter of public convenience, it is also about personal dignity.’’

IT was not always like this, Jadhav continues, as he takes me around the sprawling slum that has a population of about 15,000. ‘‘Our area was also as dirty and foul-smelling as any other slum in Mumbai. There were overflowing garbage dumps on the road. Our children and women, especially, suffered the same kind of hardship as they do elsewhere in the city’s slums. But we wanted to liberate ourselves from this condition and came to the conclusion that the best help is voluntary and organised self-help.’’

The transformation was triggered by the launch of the Mumbai Slum Sanitation Programme by the BMC, the city’s municipal corporation, in 2002, with funding from the World Bank.

What distinguished this programme from previous sanitation schemes, on which huge amounts of money had been spent with highly unsatisfactory results? Go around the slums of Mumbai and you’ll come across hundreds of public toilets that are a study in how not to build — and maintain — toilets. The squalor and stench inside and outside these utilities defies description.

Nevertheless, their very repulsiveness proves a seminal principle in social sector development. If nobody owns a public utility that everybody needs, then the scheme that funds and creates that utility is doomed.

If, on the other hand, the beneficiary community is made to own it and also maintain it by levying an appropriate user charge, the same scheme produces dramatically improved results.

The success of the World Bank-funded programme lies in the application of this simple principle and handing over of the toilets to community-based organisations (CBOs) and NGOs in slums. The Triratna Prerana Mandal, one such slum NGO, has enrolled about 100 slum households (called pass-holders), each of which, besides making a one-time initial payment of Rs 500, pays Rs 120 per year. The toilet also attracts nearly 500 members of the public daily for a per-use payment of Rs 2.

A cast-iron staircase takes me to the top of the toilet block and what I see there is even more impressive. Walking past a one-room residence of the caretaker of the toilet, I am led into another room, the office of the Mandal, where everything looks professional.

Two computers sit on a table on the far side of the room. The volunteers, only one of whom is a graduate, have learnt how to generate records, do correspondence, and prepare notices and educational pamphlets.

In an adjoining room, the Mandal has started a computer training class thanks to six computers donated by a philanthropic organisation. Over 100 boys and girls from the slum come here, and they are taught by three girls who have studied in the same class.

‘‘Our dream,’’ says Dayanand Mohite, the Mandal’s secretary, who works for Jet Airways, ‘‘is to see that the boys and girls from our slum become computer engineers some day.’’

Why the name Triratna (which means ‘‘Three Jewels’’), I ask him. ‘‘It stands for shikshan (education), kreeda (sports) and sanskruti (culture),’’ Mohite explains, ‘‘our idea of development of the slum community rests on these three pillars. The toilet has not only served an acutely felt need of the community, but it has also enabled us to organise ourselves better to intervene more effectively in the overall development of our community.’’

A visitor will not fail to notice active involvement of women volunteers in the Mandal’s activities. Pramodini is the superintendent of the women’s toilet. Deepa Mohite is the president of the Triratna Mahila Mandal, which has also set up two Mahila Bachat Samitis (savings committees), that work as women’s micro-finance groups.

Priya Jadhav, president of one of them, also runs a special class for school dropouts in the nearby municipal school, under the Central government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, an ambitious scheme for universalisation of primary education.

On the day of the Ganesh festival, these volunteers launched a new income-generation activity for slum women: making of paper-bags to replace plastic ones, recently banned by the Maharashtra government.

ONCE the Mandal earned a name for itself for running a clean community toilet and greening open spaces, the attitude of middle-class residents in the neighbourhood began to change. The colony has 40-odd buildings that house around 4,000. The very people who used to curse themselves for having to live in a slum neighbourhood now began to admire the voluntary spirit and environmental consciousness of the members of the Mandal.

A breakthrough in the relationship came when volunteers of the Mandal made a proposal to the residents of the colony: ‘‘You cannot simply depend on the municipal corporation for keeping your locality clean. We’ll do it for you.’’ The residents readily agreed. But there was a hitch. Even if the Mandal collected the garbage, it still needed the corporation’s cooperation for disposing it off.

This is when the additional municipal commissioner, Subrat Ratho, a young IAS officer, and his aide Seema Redkar gave the right guidance to the Mandal. ‘‘You organise house-to-house collection of garbage in the colony and also ensure that the households segregate the garbage into ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ material at source. The BMC’s vans will collect the wet garbage at specified timings, so that the garbage does not get dumped on the roads. The BMC will also facilitate storing the ‘dry’ garbage (plastic bags, paper) at a place so that you can sell it yourself to a kabadiwala and keep the earnings for the Mandal’s activities.’’

FOR this arrangement to work, the residents of the middle-class colony had to register themselves as an Advanced Locality Management Group — the equivalent of a Residents’ Welfare Association in other cities — under a scheme launched by the BMC. The Mandal’s volunteers helped the residents in this.

And now what has come into being is a remarkable partnership, whose visible outcome is that five of the eight ugly garbage dumps have disappeared from the roads in the colony. ‘We’ll soon ensure the other three also disappear,’’ says Jadhav.

The office-bearers of the ALM are so pleased that they come almost everyday to the Mandal’s office on top of the toilet and, since they don’t have their own office space, use it to conduct their meetings.

The partnership between the two got further cemented after the recent deluge in Mumbai, which left TPS 6 completely inundated. The residents of the slum and the colony toiled together day and night to clean up the clogged drainage lines, remove garbage that had piled up waste-high, and distribute relief material that had come from the Dorabji Tata Trust.

‘‘We are proud of these people,’’ says Syedbhai Amin, joint secretary of the ALM. A.R. Iyer, secretary of the ALM, is a guru in waste recycling. Together with volunteers of the Mandal, he has converted a room in a defunct community centre in the colony — built by the corporation 20 years ago but unused for more than a decade — into a little school to teach children from both the slum and the colony how to turn plastic bottles and bags into simple but beautiful and useful objects.

‘‘The children have so much joy coming to my class that I am overwhelmed,’’ says Iyer. Jadhav adds, ‘‘The most important thing is that, besides the opportunity to learn the ‘waste-to-wealth’ principle through do-it-yourself activities, this has brought together children from our slum and their middle-class colony to learn, play and enjoy in a shared space.’’

‘‘HOW do you sum up your organisation’s experience so far?’’ I ask Jadhav. He pauses and responds: ‘‘I draw inspiration from Babasaheb Ambedkar. He said, ‘If you want a slave to liberate himself from his slavery, first make him aware of his condition of slavery.’ Earlier, we simply suffered under unclean and unsanitary conditions. But once we realised that this was slavery and that we had the capacity to emancipate ourselves from it, we found the answer in our own organised voluntary effort. Of course, we are aware that we still have a long way to go.’’

The author, formerly an aide to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, is working as a volunteer for Mumbai Chakachak, a cleanliness campaign in his home city. He can be contacted at sudheenkulkarni@rediffmail.com

Toilet Revolutionaries

‘An integrated approach to development’

THIS year, when Seema Redkar was assigned — again — to get organisations running public toilets to spruce up their act, she camped outside one, counting the number of people walking in, adding up how much the toilet had earned in user charges that day.

Working on the ambitious scrubdown of the city’s visible waste under the McKinsey-planned Parivartan Prakalp, the OSD with the BMC has a way of making toilet cleaning look glamorous. After shooting stomach-churning videos and photographs, she organised what she called a ‘‘toilet mela’’ along with the deputy municipal commissioner (environment and waste management), Prakash Sanglikar.

Invitees were the CBOs that’d been leased the toilet land cheap. The message was simple: soiled seats, chipped tiles and leaking roofs had to go, at the operator’s cost. Or the BMC could find others to take over.

After all, running toilets may not be lucrative business, but Redkar had counted enough heads to know they could afford the repairs and beautification. Dozens of roadside shauchalays in Mumbai now actually look inviting.

That is Redkar’s style, driven mostly by initiative and common sense, backed by years of working with slum projects. ‘‘Unless you have an integrated approach, all the good work is useless,’’ she says. ‘‘And that’s why the Triratna Prerna Mandal has been successful. They’re not running a toilet, they’re uplifting a community.’’

Armed with a masters in social work from Nirmala Niketan, Redkar joined the BMC in the early 1980s, as a counsellor for the Education Department. Then, a group of community development officers were deputed to the World Bank-partnered Slum Upgradation Programme in 1986.

‘‘The most successful slum rehab project ever,’’ she calls it. ‘‘Because we made slumdwellers leaseholders of their land, gave them stakes in making the project successful.’’

When the Slum Sanitation Project launched, she already knew enough slumdwellers and specific community needs.

‘‘I met Dayanand Jadhav and his group while working on the Jawahar Rojgar Yojana,’’ she says. Jadhav didn’t get the loan, but years later, when Seema didi returned and asked if his Mandal would be interested in maintaining a toilet, he jumped at the idea.

‘‘The personal touch matters,’’ she insists. ‘‘When building folk have a cup of tea with them, you’re building a relationship that will change their lives.’’

Next? ‘‘Why not a toilet inside every shanty? It’ll clean up the slums entirely.’’

‘Rags are okay to wear, if they’re clean’

‘‘CRICKET,’’ says Dayanand Jadhav sheepishly when asked what first drew residents of Santacruz’s Khotwadi slum to his Triratna Prerna Mandal. ‘‘And our cultural activities, which gave youngsters a platform for their talent.’’ Jadhav, consumed with the notion that he had to ‘‘return something to society’’, had even joined a political party, but won’t say which one.

‘‘Suffice to say I learnt that if anybody has a photo taken as he breaks a coconut, that project will simply never succeed. That’s the lesson I learnt in politics.’’

When talk began about a community toilet in place of the temporary BMC block, the Mandal’s first job was to gather support — the requirement for a 12-seat block was a minimum of 600 users willing to pay a monthly user charge. The mandal decided to target women. ‘‘In slums or elsewhere, if you talk to women about their children’s health, they’ll always listen,’’ says the father of two.

And in Khotwadi, children ‘‘doing potty’’ on roadsides with traffic rushing past was a hazard mothers were well acquainted with.

The other sales spiel was of disease. ‘‘We come here to rid our bodies of something dirty,’’ Jadhav says daintily. ‘‘So what’s the point if we end up taking back dirt and germs?’’

The mindset of not paying for something that’s been traditionally free was the biggest hurdle, but the nine-member exective body of the Mandal worked on it. By 2003, the response was so great that the Mandal added two seats.

Finances are tight — the annual income from user families is Rs 7,000, monthly income from non-subscriber users (‘‘outsiders’’) is about Rs 8,000, three sweepers are paid Rs 2,000 a month each, plus half a dozen ragpickers, power and water bills.

‘‘But the BMC cooperates,’’ he says. ‘‘We haven’t paid water charges for seven months. But we paid some part of it and the BMC tolerates us. They know this is good work.’’

His pet advice to the 80 subscriber families of the toilet is something his father told him: ‘‘It’s okay if you’re wearing rags, but make sure they’re clean.’’

‘Try it, then you’ll understand’

LIGHTEYED and coquettish, Priya Jadhav is an unlikely candidate to be running a computer class atop a toilet block.

Shouldn’t she be in college? ‘‘I’m planning to start my B.Com soon,’’ she says. ‘‘But this experience is adding to my skills, right?’’ says the 19-year-old who finished school two years ago.

It started when the Mandal announced it was looking for volunteers to teach dropouts as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. Priya signed up. A rough survey they conducted showed over 650 children in Khotwadi didn’t attend formal school. Priya started classes, first in a room atop the toilet block and then in a classroom of the local civic school.

‘‘I could see what the toilet offered us — never-before cleanliness, a space to get together and participate in activities together and a chance to grow,’’ she says. The women had by then formed the savings groups, saving Re 1 a day. Her students, 25-30 of them, were getting notebooks, pencils and erasers from the Mandal. And suddenly, the forgotten toilet block in the corner was buzzing.

‘‘Then I got interested in construction workers’ children,’’ she says, ‘‘because they were the most neglected lot, here one day, gone the next.’’ The Mandal offered her space atop the toilet and some supplies whenever possible, and Priya decided she really enjoyed teaching.

Already, the Sterlite Foundation had launched a computer class in the spare room, again atop the toilet block. She learnt BASIC, Tally and a couple of other IT essentials, then signed up to teach. Sterlite now pays her Rs 2,500 a month.

‘‘It’s only when you start doing something like this that you understand its value in your life,’’ she says simply. ‘‘Try it,’’ she advises, ‘‘then you’ll know.’’

Cleaning up the act

When slumdwellers own their public loos, they maintain them better than their homes, finds Kavitha Iyer

FIVE thousand toilet seats did what years of lecturing, cleanliness campaigns and hundreds of ‘‘nuisance detectors’’ could not do in Mumbai’s teeming slums. They made slumdwellers willing, really willing, to pay for a pee.

It was under the World Bank-funded Slum Sanitation Project in 2002-03 that 338 toilet blocks were built in shanty towns. ‘‘But it’s not just the toilets that did the trick,’’ says Seema Redkar, OSD with the BMC who worked then on the toilet project. After all, there were toilets before SSP too.

Before the SSP took off, a survey commissioned by the BMC made a miserable computation: 62 per cent of slumdwellers use public toilets, not counting those who just go in the open, along railway tracks or in shrubbery.

And with over half of Mumbai’s population living in slums, the ratio of slumdwellers to derelict toilet seats was depressing — about 80,000 seats (many not in usable shape) for about seven million Mumbaiites.

So, SSP’s 5,000 seats could not have been a mutinous change. But what SSP did was turn traditional civic-maintained toilet blocks on their head, giving the slumdwellers complete charge of their maintenance and operation.

Add heavy use with poor construction — atop a septic tank, with flagging wooden doors, often with no electricity and sometimes with no water supply — and public toilets’ frequent maintenance requirements are a big drain on civic resources. So, ironically, the toilets designed to give slumdwellers access to sanitation create a huge health hazard right in the middle of slums.

THE SSP simply altered the BMC’s role, from unwilling financier of its toilet stock to capacity builder, providing community development officers to talk to user groups, promote health and hygiene and play catalyst to other development programmes.Slumdwellers were expected to shoulder the financial burden of managing the sanitation facilities plus paying utility bills.

The sense of ownership — these community toilets have a subscriber group, a capped number of households paying a monthly fee — led organisations maintaining them to go at it with a vengeance. They innovated outrageously, adding television sets somewhere for those in queue to watch, newspapers and magazines elsewhere. One group even launched an ambulance service, with a telephone inside and the twinkling van waiting outside.

Phase 2, with scaled-up targets of over 1,000 blocks, is awaiting implementation. And typically, that file has been stalled somewhere for nearly a year, while bureaucrats and governments squabble over the minutiae.