Mumbai: The queues outside the public toilets in Shivaji Nagar begin as soon as they open around 6am. With 145 people jostling for each toilet seat in this Govandi neighbourhood, the wait to relieve oneself can often take 30-45 minutes. If the line moves smoothly, there’s an air of camaraderie—neighbours gossip while children chase each other—but even a small delay can cause a mini riot. When the bathroom attendant doesn’t open the facilities on time, people get belligerent and start yelling. And if someone dawdles, the crowd’s heckling can pummel even their constipated bowels into submission.Shivaji Nagar is a large patch of urban slums near Deonar’s 132-hectare landfill. It covers 32.5sqkm and houses approximately six lakh people, around 11.5% of Mumbai’s slum population. Most people here have no idea that Monday is World Toilet Day—a day set aside by the United Nations to inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis—but every man, woman and child can dictate a thesis on the lack of functional toilets in the neighbourhood.This month, Apnalaya, an NGO that works in 12 slum clusters across Shivaji Nagar, calculated the ratio of people per toilet seat by counting the number of functional toilets in their areas of operation and dividing it by the population they serve. The final tally of 145:1 is higher than most other parts of the city and a far cry from the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’s ideal of 25 people per toilet seat.“In Shivaji Nagar, open defecation is rampant because people cannot always wait for their turn,” says Apnalaya CEO Arun Kumar. “And the long-term impact of that is regular bouts of diarrhoea. So, whatever we achieve in terms of bringing children out of the underweight category, these bouts of diarrhoea push them back into that category.”This is particularly troubling in a neighbourhood where 57% of the children are stunted compared to 34.4% across Maharashtra; and 44% of children are underweight compared to 36% across the state.In Shivaji Nagar, most residents purchase water for washing and cleaning. Thus, public toilets, which don’t have a water connection, quickly get dirty because residents try to scrimp on water. This leads to gutters and drains getting clogged, sewerage overflowing into the narrow alleys and even seeping into homes. The pay-and-use toilets provide water, but it is usually discoloured. “If you don’t come home and bathe, you feel itchy,” says Hazratun Sheikh, a resident.Kiran Dighavkar, BMC’s nodal officer for Swachh Bharat Abhiyan , explains that the difficulty with building more toilets in Shivaji Nagar ranges from lack of space because of the densely-packed nature of the neighbourhood to getting the requisite permissions because much of the land belongs to the collector or falls under the coastal regulation zone. Also, as the land is mostly reclaimed marshy land, which is difficult to build on, contractors are reluctant to construct loos here.

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