Emergence of community toilets as a public good: The sanitation work of Mahila Milan, NSDF and SPARC in India

Emergence of community toilets as a public good was written by Sheela Patel together with a team from the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), Mahila Milan and SPARC. This document reports their sanitation work in India over several decades, tracing their passionate commitment to tackle issues of sanitation for slum dwellers. This strategy for building community toilets, to give the urban poor safe and dignified access to sanitation, commenced in the early 1980s. The report highlights that such community-based efforts are neither simple nor quick; they are fraught with challenges and risks.

Despite their imperfection – which this report is keen to acknowledge – the work of SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan (the Alliance) has numerous achievements that would not exist had it not been willing to engage with risks and learn from mistakes. Alongside building hundreds of community toilets serving over 400,000 people, the Alliance has organized urban poor communities; challenged the state to finance the provision of toilets in slums as a public good; connected poor communities to various levels of government and opened a dialogue that enables other basic needs to be explored; and through surveys highlighted the reality of sanitation problems among slum and pavement dwellers, bringing these onto city-wide agendas.  

Comprising seven key sections, this report details this process. The Introduction looks at the state and importance of sanitation, and sets sanitation as an indicator of good governance. A timeline shows the Alliance’s work in constructing toilets starting in 1987 up until 2014.

Section two tells in detail of the beginnings of this work and the first construction of a community roadside toilet block at P D’Mello Road in Mumbai. It describes how sanitation and community-built toilets spread not only in India, but elsewhere, through Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) exchange visits.

The third section outlines the technical details and process involved in building community toilet blocks. Patel highlights the individual, case-by-case design for each toilet project, yet also identifies overarching points such as door design, toilets at central locations, and organization for heavy use (pages 24–25). She also lists technical and cost-reducing measures and expands upon “10 Big Ideas”, which sum up the principles and concepts behind community-built toilet blocks (pages 31–33). 

Section four moves on to share how the Alliance began to explore city-wide slum sanitation strategies. It lists insights garnered from working in many Indian cities, and furthermore identifies the risks the Alliance had to take when deciding to work on city-wide strategies. The main part of this section then details two opportunities the Alliance had to work in Mumbai (on a World Bank-funded project) and Pune (on a municipal city-wide slum sanitation project).

The fifth section reports “how the successes in Pune and Mumbai led to an opportunity to make a presentation to the prime minister’s office in 2000 on the potential for universal sanitation”, and thus scale up the Alliance’s work (page 55). It describes how the World Bank wanted to champion the Alliance’s community sanitation work as the Bank viewed it “a critical urban breakthrough” (page 56). Furthermore the resulting high-level partnerships between the Alliance and other organizations and the government led to the formation of India’s National Urban Sanitation Policy (adopted in 2009), and the extension of municipally-funded city-wide sanitation to more Indian cities (page 59).

Following on, section six discusses monitoring and capacity building. In particular it shares the two-stage process of monitoring community toilet blocks built in Mumbai, and explains the Alliance’s survey strategy – allowing city wards to be compared as well as creating an overall picture of Mumbai (page 81).

The final section reflects upon the Alliance’s process of advocacy and how it unfolded through constructing community toilets. Patel identifies three phases of advocacy including: naming the challenge, championing change and moving it to scale, and expanding the circles of exploration to more than one location. This section ends by discussing how to scale up sanitation provision, the value of local and international exchange and key significant exchanges for the Alliance, and final reflections.

This report covers a broad scale – from building a community toilet block on the streets of Mumbai to influencing a national policy of India and the global agenda for sanitation as a right. Emergence of community toilets as a public good is an insightful read for students, development practitioners, policymakers, municipal leaders, and donor organizations, among others.

Available from:

http://www.shareresearch.org/research/emergence-community-toilets-public-good

Book note prepared by Hannah Keren Lee