Transparency and public toilets in India

Q: Commercial public toilets and so called 'community toilets' have been tried in several cities in India and there is interest in using these on a larger scale. Since both involve some form of payment for use both provide opportunities for corruption and raise issues of transparency and financial accountability. Do you have information on this?
(researcher, LSHTM, UK)

Answer: Lots of public toilets, the majority in slums and peri-urban areas just don’t work right and are really horrible. As with all things where money flows and contractors are used, there can be problems. One good example of transparency in finance and good operating facilities comes from Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu where the public toilet/baths are run by federated women’s savings groups where the members check each other.

Read more on the Tiruchi model:

Ganapathy, V. “A silent revolution for healthy living in the slums of Tiruchi” in Martin J. Bunch, V. Madha Suresh and T. Vasantha Kumaran, eds., Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Environment and Health, Chennai, India, 15-17 December, 2003. Chennai: Department of Geography, University of Madras and Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University. Pages 138 – 142.

Andhra team praises Tiruchi model of pay-and-use toilets, The Hindu, 11 Jan 2005, http://www.hindu.com/2005/01/11/stories/2005011106570300.htm

Documents
In addition, you can find more about public toilets through IRC´s library database IRCDOC, using the following links:

http://www.irc.nl/docsearch/results/?subj=104453 (public toilets)
http://www.irc.nl/docsearch/results/?subj=102046 (community blocks)

One of the publications from the first list gives some interesting insights from outside India:

Ayee, J. and Crook, R. (2003). Toilet wars : urban sanitation services and the politics of public-private partnerships in Ghana. (Working paper / IDS; no. 213). Brighton, UK, University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies.

This paper examines the impact of the new forms of partnership between the public authorities and private/citizen-based organisations on urban environmental sanitation in the two largest cities of Ghana – Accra and Kumasi. It traces the history of public toilet policies in the two cities and analyses the factors that contributed to their relative failure in poor neighbourhoods. Toilets consistently have been poorly managed and have been the site of local political conflicts – toilet wars – despite efforts at franchising them and involving communities in their management. This is attributable to the politics of patronage at the urban level, the relationship between city government patronage and community level groups, and the failure of regulation. Public-private partnerships have not worked. The provision of reasonable sanitation facilities may require: full public provision of basic infrastructure; transparent, independent and rigorous regulation of any contracts for service provision given to non-state agencies; and the enforcement of “conflict of interest” laws applying to elected local representatives.

A good overview of experiences with public toilets in India is:

Burra, S. ; Patel, S. and Kerr, T. (2003). Community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks in Indian cities. Environment and urbanization ; vol. 15, no 2 ; p.. 11-32.

This paper describes the ten-year programme of community designed, built and managed toilet blocks undertaken by urban poor federations and women’s cooperatives, with support from the Indian NGO SPARC. This programme has reached hundreds of thousands of poor urban dwellers with much improved sanitation and facilities for washing; it has also demonstrated how such provision is affordable and manageable for all Indian cities. But this programme has also demonstrated to city authorities the capacity and competence of urban poor organizations, and helped change the relationship between the residents of slums and local government agencies. The paper begins by explaining why sanitation has been neglected, and describes the inadequacies in government sanitation programmes. It then describes the first experiments with community sanitation and the difficult negotiations in many cities, including Mumbai, Kanpur and Bangalore. Then it discusses the major community toilet programmes that developed in Pune and Mumbai. It highlights the innovations that allowed these to work better than previous public toilet blocks, the reasons why the urban poor organizations took on these projects, the lessons learnt and the ways in which community toilet blocks helped address other problems faced by the urban poor.

WIN
Finally, you may also want to contact the Water Integrity Network (WIN). They are promoting anti-corruption solutions in water, sanitation and water resources management worldwide.