Lately, my work (i.e. life) has turned to crap. While not entirely false in figurative sense, it is actually because I’m beginning a new, much more feces-laden phase of our project: an audit of the public toilet facilities and garbage collection/street cleaning in Delhi. The general goal of our project is to push elected officials to provide better public services, and we will use the audits to measure if we have any effect. Even if we don’t, it should be a pretty cool dataset, and I’m hoping to link our surveyed households to specific service sites to see how service delivery might affect political behavior, or vice versa (e.g. if a household has particularly bad services, does that change their voting behavior, and how? Or is services delivery a reward for past voting behavior?). It would also be cool to link this with health outcomes, though that might prove more difficult.
You will probably not be too shocked to learn that these facilities are not quite as nice as the Swarthmore dorm bathrooms, much as we griped about them, and are not even comparable to the stately thrones on Parrish 1st. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi is supposed to provide free and high-quality public toilet facilities to every slum in the Delhi area*, as well as trash pickup and cleanup. However, in the vast majority of places we go to, the MCD… does not. At all. Many of the toilets have been contracted out to private NGOs, who charge high rates for use of the facilities, making it difficult for ordinary people to use them. Imagine you’re a family of five, and each person has to use the bathroom 4 times a day. Even at the low rate of 1 Rs. per visit (it’s usually higher), that can easily add up to half or a quarter of someone’s daily salary, and is especially problematic for women. Our main partner NGO, SNS, has done a lot of work on preventing price gouging, but it’s a huge problem in terms of personal wellbeing and maintaining a sanitary, disease free environment.
Another issue is the obvious one: these facilities are horribly maintained. Usually there is excrement lying around everywhere, clogged drains, broken toilets and little privacy. Running water, or soap? Forget about it. Many have been shut down or are underutilized because people prefer to do their business into drains or open fields rather than using them. I saw one case where the MCD shut the slum’s toilet facilities down, and, of course, a family promptly moved in, cleaned it up, and was using the area to raise goats and chickens. Toilet stalls with walls make perfect pens!
Garbage is a somewhat more complicated issue (as well as much more difficult to measure). It may seem like a simple thing: people will want their trash removed quickly. However, there are distributional issues: rag-pickers actually want some of the garbage to be left so that they something to resell. Professionalizing the garbage pickup service would put them out of job, and as they are already at the margins of society, that is problematic.
And …. my cat just threw up. Time to attend to that: more on this later. For those of you who have complained that I don’t post enough pictures, I am planning a future post which entirely consists of my favorite Delhi public toilets and garbage dump sites. When I come back and scrap book, I’m sure I’ll put those right next to the one of the Taj Mahal.
*Except in the New Delhi area, which we exclude from our project.
You are the best/worst.
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