Few months back when the Union Minister Jairam Ramesh made an observation that in India we have more temples than toilets, there was a general unqualified uproar among the political class who like always demanded an apology even on a genuine concern.
As
a resident of a ‘so called’ well planned and affluent locality like HSR Layout
my observation is no different than the Union Minister. Construction workers
waking up as early as 4 am to attend their nature calls in a close by empty site
or darker areas away from sight of early morning walker is a regular ritual,
the plight of women construction workers is indeed unimaginable. If one decides
to ignore the woes of construction workers or hawkers around as temporary,
think about the people who visit the commercial areas of the Layout. Recently I
was at a well know food joint on the 27th main, a older lady walked
in requesting the person behind the counter if she could use the toilet, the
man very reluctantly nodded.
Incidents
like these are neither isolated nor unknown, somewhere the sense of building/planning
for a basic facility like a public toilet is not a priority, and indeed it
shows complete lack of civic sensibilities from the authorities. While generously
doling out CA sites to institutions even in areas that may beat any planning
sense the authorities have looked the other way when it comes to providing a
basic facilities to a human being, depriving them of human dignity.
What
could be more worst than the visuals of construction people walking with water
bottles early in the morning, a lady begging to use a toilet at a food joint, a
man relieving himself against a compound wall, I wonder when will the
authorities wake up to reality?
The
medieval mindset of class and gender bias has to change in our urban planning,
it’s the primary responsibility of the authorities to provide basic facilities
to everyone and make urban planning more inclusive. India is a welfare state
and in the midst of commercial focus the idea of India seems to be somewhere lost
in the planning by the authorities.
Urbanization
is a reality, unless the authorities are not contemporary and inclusive in
their outlook and planning we will be left with more and more ‘toilets in
public’ with no public toilets across locality.
For
the authorities it should be effortless to set-up few paid toilets and issue
pre-paid passes to construction workers. Making it mandatory for owner of the
property under construction to pay and avail passes for all its construction
workers is definitely practical to implement.
Let’s
not forget the hard fact that one may or may not go to a temple but everyone
has to use a toilet. As
a modern day quote rightly says ‘Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail’, it’s
about time the authorities acknowledge the mistakes of mindless
planning/development and fix the problems rather than leaving people to deal
with their own plight.
- Kavitha Reddy