The Big Necessity (32 page)

In Paromita Vohra's documentary
Q2P
, a slum mason called Sheikh Razak is interviewed. He's a liability, really, because he builds flush toilets in slums with no sewers that empty into open drains. But that's what people want, he insists. They aspire to “an apartment where there's a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. People see that and they want the same for themselves, a bigger house with different rooms for everything. They can't have all that so they get the big necessity, a toilet.”

 

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The big necessity is a rarity. It is physically impractical and would be ruinously expensive for every slum dweller to have a flush toilet or latrine. Costly sewer lines would have to be laid by sewer authorities who refuse to do so in slums that are illegally occupied because that might amount to recognizing property rights. Also, the chances of recouping the costs through tax and rates would be slim. (Sewers were installed in parts of Kampala, Uganda, in the early 1930s because engineers calculated that annual running costs would be only £850. In fact, they were £2,000, and sewers have turned out to cost five times more than the old night-soil collection system.) Sewers and waterborne sewage treatment may be the default option for planners, in rich and poor cities alike, but in these teeming, dense areas, it is as dreamy a vision as that SUV that will never be bought parked in front of gardens that will never be built.

There are other ways, however, to get sewers into poor urban areas: Brazil has been using “simplified sewerage” for twenty years now. Its smaller pipes can be laid in shallower trenches, and the main sewer is laid in backyards, not on the street (a practice that makes for long, expensive house-to-sewer connections). Costs are slashed. Another simplified sewer system in the huge Karachi slum of Orangi has been a striking success. Nine out of ten Orangi residents—95,000 houses—now have flush toilets and sewers. It took years and required dizzying levels of community organizing. Each lane of houses had to agree, and also pay for the lane sewerage, while the authority generally provided trunk sewers. The Orangi Pilot Project is now a superstar in sanitation circles and has been repeated in forty-two other Karachi slums. In India simplified sewerage surfaces as “slum networking,” though its spread has so far been limited.

In Mumbai, the next best option in slums is the community toilet block. Historically, these have been installed by the municipality or by whichever politician was seeking slum votes at the time. No provision was made for maintenance. No sewers or water were provided. The National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), in an excellent publication called
Toilet Talk
, sums up these efforts with withering scorn: “Each
system has its own particular agenda, its own donor constituency and its own attitudes towards slums: government slum improvement systems which pay for expensive contractor-built latrines but no maintenance afterwards; political organisations that do toilets only for particular castes; engineers who do only high-tech ferrocement wonders that poor people are scared to enter; Rotary Clubs which bestow ‘fully-tiled facilities' but don't provide water connections or follow-up maintenance to go with them; rival charities which do aqua-privies for Jesus, and appropriate-technology types who concoct elaborate biogas latrines with noble dreams of turning feces into cooking fuel.”

None of them, as you'd guess from the tone, have worked. Pay toilets, meanwhile, charged one rupee per entry. Even assuming you don't have diarrhea, and you only need to go once a day, this adds up to 150 rupees a month, when the daily wage can be a few rupees and many people earn nothing. There is a joke that poor people are the only ones in cities who can't afford to get diarrhea. NSDF, under the umbrella of a larger Indian NGO called SPARC, thought there might be a different way.

“Sometimes,”
Toilet Talk
continues, “grassroots activism involves a great deal of scolding and finger-pointing:
Isn't this awful? Isn't that shameful?
 . . . This kind of stuff has limited utility. People in power are more likely to pull back inside their bureaucratic shells like bumped turtles, the minute you start pelting with them
awfuls
and
shamefuls
.” SPARC realized that they had something else to pelt the government with, and that was a cheaper, better solution. It would still involve the community toilet, but this time slum dwellers would be asked to contribute to its construction and maintenance. They are experts in the art of survival, SPARC reasoned, and with more plumbers, joiners, and artisans per square foot than probably anywhere else in the city, why not use them? If they help build their own toilets, and the state agrees to supply water and sewer lines, then the usual problems—lack of maintenance, political corruption, hassle—can be avoided.
Toilet Talk
summed up this toilet utopia. “No middlemen, no contractor's profits, no cream for anybody to skim off. These are 100 percent fat-free toilets.”

 

_______

 

Today, SPARC fat-free toilet blocks serve 400,000 people in eight Indian cities. A SPARC employee takes me to see one in the Kamla Raman Nagar slum. To get to the toilet, you walk past small girls squatting to defecate, step over several open drains, remembering that you once saw water that was blue, not this black-gray mire, and you look for a two-story building with gaps in the concrete that serve as windows. Once you see the fish tank, you're in the right place.

The toilet is run by a community committee headed by Rayeen Abdul Sattar. He greets us at his desk, upstairs on the second floor opposite a small hall that will be used as a computer room when they can afford the computers. Other SPARC toilets use the second story as a classroom, or library, or video lounge, because it's clean and people are proud of it. A toilet committee in Cheetah Camp slum used the fees to pay for the only ambulance for miles around, in installments.

Sattar offers tea and biscuits and tells a tale he's told before. His toilet replaced a municipal one that was neglected and decrepit. It opened on November 19, 2002, on World Toilet Day, though not without troubles. The new toilet offered a membership plan to its users: anyone who wanted to use it could join up and pay 30 rupees a month or one rupee per visit. This didn't go down well. Nobody had paid to use the bathroom before and nobody wanted to start. Sattar spent weeks going from door to door. He had to persuade people for whom 30 rupees was a day's wages. He also dealt with “antisocial elements,” thugs who would “go from house to house with a book saying people had to pay five rupees if they wanted to ‘go' [defecate] outside.” If people brought water with them when they came to the old toilet, and they hadn't paid the protection fee, the thugs threw the water away. Sattar doesn't explain to me how he got rid of them, because by now he has pulled out his ledger and wants to show me the toilet's vital statistics. These have been recorded with the detail that comes with idleness or pride. In and among the 310 households on the plan, there are 280 boys below the age of ten, for example, and 275 girls above it. Sattar believes in attention to detail. He knows people have to be persuaded to care and he does what he can
to encourage it. Membership fees pay for a caretaker and three cleaners. They have also paid for the fish tank at the entrance.

I've never been in a toilet with a fish tank before. I look at it for a while, probably because it looks so fresh, and because after several days of slum-walking I can feel the dirt going up my nose into my brain. The fish serve a design purpose, because the tank acts as a barrier between male and female entrances. SPARC's design incorporated several innovations, including training women masons to build the toilet blocks and consulting with women on how to improve things. Separate lines were requested, as were doors that swing both ways to make it easier for women carrying heavy water pots or toddlers to enter. Children's toilets are another innovation. They are meant to prevent children being pushed out of the way at busy times, and their open-style stalls and smaller latrine pans soothe children scared of big, dark latrines they can fall into. The children's toilets here conform to both design criteria but they are empty and look unused. Twin boys with orange T-shirts and identical smiles have been sticking to me through the tour, and they say they don't like to use the children's latrines “because people can see you.” There are better hiding spots outside. The tank is supposed to stop this. “I put it in to encourage people to come here,” says Sattar. “So they don't go outside. At least maybe they'll come to look at the fish.”

Not all SPARC toilets are such ringing—and fishing—success stories. There's another in Shamabahaji Nagar. In theory, this toilet should run like clockwork. It has all the parts: a caretaker, a community membership plan. The difference is in the organization. The toilet is managed like a poorly run business. It's five years old, but it looks three times that age. There are no doors on the stalls and no water in the taps. There is no fish tank. “We took away the taps because people were abusing them,” says the toilet's young manager, whose uncle is the boss. I tell Siddarth Shirur about it. He's a young architect who designed over forty toilets for SPARC in Pune and Mumbai. He has seen pictures of his toilets recently and he thought they looked run-down, unkempt. “I'm beginning to think that open defecation is healthier than those toilets. Is all we're doing creating an enclosure for defecating? It should be more than that.”

SPARC may not be to blame for the failure of some toilet businesses. The organization hands over control to the community after a yearlong transition. Then the making or breaking of the toilet is up to the people who use it. This is known as “self-mobilization.” It's not the whole answer. The development writer Jeremy Seabrook writes that “it would be foolish to pass from one distortion—that the slums are places of crime, disease and despair—to the opposite; that they can be safely left to look after themselves.” Nonetheless, the genius of the SPARC alliance has been to set up partnerships that bother to include poor people. As
Toilet Talk
concludes plainly, “The politician is not the man to wash the poor person's bum.”

SPARC's business is booming along with the slums. A new contract will see two hundred more toilet blocks built, a total of two thousand new toilet seats. It's impressive, but it's also not much. Siddarth Shirur, who will design some of the new toilets, sounds dispirited. What are a few toilet blocks in the face of the ever-growing slums? “People keep coming to Mumbai,” he says. “And they just keep coming.” He watched a slum appear under his windows in three months. “Four walls, an asbestos roof and the house is ready. The Chief Minister wants to make Mumbai into Shanghai! But how do you stop the slums?”

 

Dar es Salaam is a pleasant city in the pleasant East African country of Tanzania. As a taxi takes me from the airport to my hotel, I realize it's the first normal, stable African country I've visited, because the others have been Liberia (just after a big war), Côte d'Ivoire (just before a little war), Burundi (in the middle of a long war), and South Africa (just, well, odd). In Dar es Salaam, people walk on the streets, unlike in Johannesburg, and wait for buses, unlike in Liberia, which has none. But appearances deceive. Tanzania is one of the most studied countries in Africa. It doesn't have wars, it does have beaches, and it's very poor. This makes it an NGO and academic honeypot.

I have come here to hang out with a human bundle of energy named Steven Sugden. He teaches at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, but though he's been there for several years, he refuses to call himself an academic. His business card gives his title as
“On-site Excreta Management Specialist,” a title he chose and that he declares is “catchy.” He came into excreta management after years working on water “because water's even more bent.” Sugden is an inventor and a doer. If he wants to find something out, he experiments. Some of the experiments he has told me about include: “shitting into a bucket for six months to see how it would decompose”; building a still and peeing into it to try to figure out how and why urine smells; and getting an old schoolmate from Bradford to cobble together a pump that might solve some of the most intractable problems of urban living.

Sugden has come to Tanzania because the London School, via WaterAid, has been commissioned by the World Bank to solve a curious sanitation problem. It is curious because in theory Dar es Salaam doesn't have a sanitation problem. On paper, 96 percent of Tanzanians have a pit latrine or some access to a sanitary facility. But it is a hollow figure. First, having a latrine is a legal requirement in Tanzania, so who, answering a government survey, is going to admit to not having one? Second—and this is a problem common to all figures and percentages that relate to sanitation, from Tanzania's 96 percent to those 2.6 billion toiletless—saying someone has a latrine doesn't mean they have safe sanitation. Proper sanitation is a system involving containment, emptying, and disposal. It's always more than a latrine.

In a paper accompanying the UN's Human Development Report, David Satterthwaite and Gordon McGranahan noted that “according to official UN statistics in 2000, the urban population of Kenya and Tanzania appear better served with sanitation than the urban population of Brazil and Mexico. But seventy-five percent of Brazil's households have toilets in their homes connected to sewers (and many Brazilian cities have virtually one hundred percent coverage of this); in Kenya and Tanzania . . . a high proportion of urban households classed as having ‘improved provision' have poor-quality pit latrines often shared with many other groups, that present many problems for fecal contamination of users and the wider environment.”

What does this fecal contamination consist of? Flying toilets and DIY emptying. The cheapest latrine in Tanzania, and in every other developing country, is a plastic bag. Kenyans call them helicopter toilets; Tanzanians prefer flying toilets. Whatever the name, the technique is the
same: defecate, wrap, and throw. Anywhere will do, though roofs are a favorite target and alleys are popular. The plastic bag is a step up from open defecation because it can be done in private, and it is contained, at least in theory. The next step up is a pit latrine, if it is affordable. Pit latrines in Dar es Salaam cost up to $300 each, because they have sturdy concrete slabs and big 10-feet-deep pits, and it requires skill to dig them in Dar's sandy soils. Money can be saved by installing “temporary toilets” instead, where the pit consists of two oil drums stacked one on top of the other or is lined with tires. Or by leaving off the roof. The walls in Tanzanian latrines, such as they are—I see hodgepodges of corrugated iron, old doors, or rice sacks, held together with hope—only reach to shoulder height. Tanzanians with sharp humor call these structures passport toilets, because they show as much as a passport photograph would, and as much as a decent toilet shouldn't.