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.

Corruption in water sector Kenya

Q: I intend to conduct my thesis on corruption in the water sector, looking in particular at the case of the water services decentralization programme currently in progress in Kenya.
I am seeking for professional advice and guidance on how to go about this issue.
Kenyan student

Answer:
Are you aware of the Water Integrity Network (WIN)? WIN promotes anti-corruption solutions in water, sanitation and water resources management worldwide. Its founding members are IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), Swedish Water House (SWH), Water and Sanitation Program - Africa (WSP-AF), and Transparency International (TI). The latter is also hosting the WIN secretariat.

One of the publications you will find on the WIN web site is:
Tackling corruption in the water and sanitation sector in Africa, by Janelle Plummer and Piers Cross (2006).

Abstract (taken from the WIN site)
For the past three decades a substantial number of governments, donors and NGOs have focused efforts on a range of institutional, financial, technical and social interventions aimed at bringing about much-needed improvements in the delivery of water and sanitation services in rural and urban areas of Africa. Yet the attainment of the water and sanitation MDGs in Africa is unlikely in the majority of African countries – the stability, investment and capacity needed to meet significant and growing demand is lacking. But even if additional finance was to become available, the unacceptable level of leakage of existing resources brings into question current processes and, perhaps, the wisdom of increasing resource flows to the sector. Much of the funding available in ministries, local governments, utilities and village administrations is being used by public office for private gain.

Despite the complexity, leakage, and the potential impacts on the poor, there is currently only a limited understanding of the extent and nature of corruption in the water and sanitation sector in Africa, and limited knowledge of the policies and mechanisms that are required to tackle it. To address this concern, and to help the sector ‘catch up’, the purpose of this paper is to promote more comprehensive understanding of sector corruption and potential anti-corruption mechanisms among a broad audience of WSS stakeholders. The paper describes the plural nature of corruption in the WSS sector corruption by setting out, in a structured framework, the network of corrupt practices prevalent in the sector. It collects together the many types of WSS corruption into typologies of public to public, public to private, and public to consumer interactions. It then describes the range of anti-corruption policies and mechanisms that have been developed to prevent or counter anti-corruption activity in the sector – mapping these over the corrupt interactions – and thus linking the framework of corrupt practices to the menu of existing solutions.

Notwithstanding this effort to promote a more comprehensive understanding of corruption, the paper emphasizes the need to undertake rigorous diagnostics to identify areas of concentrated corruption, and to focus efforts on improving sector understanding of what anti-corruption strategies are most appropriate. Based on sector trends and experiences, lessons of similar sectors, and the increasing shift of anti-corruption activity generally, it suggests that the most promising model for anti-corruption sector reform in the African continent lies in the development of greater transparency and accountability mechanisms – supported by ongoing efforts in WSS sector reform.It argues however for context specificity and for efforts to develop appropriate methodologies and models for sector interventions in the different economic, governance, and WSS contexts of the African region.

- Download: Tackling corruption in the water and sanitation sector in Africa (483 KB) http://www.waterintegritynetwork.net/redir/content/download/174/1434/file/Tackling%20Corruption%20in%20the%20Water%20and%20Sanitation%20Sector%20in%20Africa%20Chapter%20version.pdf