Toilet revolution – Triratna Prerana Mandal, Santacruz
Source – Indian Express, September 18, 2005
Flushed with pride
Sudheendra Kulkarni tells the remarkable story of how one toilet in one slum in Mumbai has changed an entire neighbourhood. And the lesson this holds for our cities
When I recently wrote an article in this newspaper on the need for a ‘‘Toilet Revolution’’ (‘‘Freedom from filth’’, August 31) in India, little did I realise I would soon come across a community toilet in a slum in Mumbai that has become a catalyst for a remarkable socio-economic and environmental revolution at the grassroots
Imagine a toilet NGO that keeps its community-cum-public toilet nearly as clean as the one in your household. That runs a computer class for slum children on top of the toilet block. That has organised women in the slum into a savings and self-help group.
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’’.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.’’