Delhi govt to provide 24/7 toilet facility in slums

Three months after Hindustan Times reported how women had to defecate in the open because community toilets were closed at night, the Delhi government is installing mobile toilets outside existing toilet complexes.

Three months after Hindustan Times reported how women had to defecate in the open because community toilets were closed at night, the Delhi government is installing mobile toilets outside existing toilet complexes.

The Delhi government will install mobile toilets outside existing toilet complexes across the city. (Ravi Choudhary / HT Photo)

In July, HT had reported how as in many slums, public toilets were locked after 11pm and residents stopped feeding their children after sunset so that they don’t need to visit the toilet at night. “We have no choice but to ask our kids not to eat in the evening. We have seen cases where children did not return after going to the forest to relieve themselves,” 45-year-old Raj Kumari, a resident of Shahbad Dairy had told HT.

To address this problem, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), the agency responsible for providing toilet facilities in slums, has decided to install prefabricated toilets outside toilet complexes. For security reasons, the toilet complexes are closed at night and these mobile toilets will be placed right outside them.

“The timing for these toilet complexes will remain the same, but we will have extra toilets, which will stay open only at night. We will also deploy security guards if we open the entire complex in the night to avoid any cases of theft,” said a DUSIB official.

The DUSIB has conducted a survey and found there are 259 open defecation spots in Delhi. It has plans to construct two lakh public toilets across Delhi of which 1.5 lakh will be in slum clusters in the next five years. According to senior Delhi government officials, one of the major reasons behind the lack of toilet complexes is that most of the slum clusters are not connected to the sewage system making it difficult to even put up a temporary mobile toilet facility there.

There are three types of toilets in the city – individual, which is constructed by different agencies, community, which are in slums and maintained by DUSIB and public toilets, which are managed by civic bodies.

NUMBERS GAME:

Total number of slums in Delhi: 3,29,870

Number of slums having individual toilet: 92,869

Number of slums requiring toilets: 2,37,001

Number of toilet seats required @ 1 seat for 30 persons: 39,541

Total seats available: 18,373

Number of seats required: 24,036

Number of seats proposed: 17,846

Rest will be managed through mobile toilets

Funding:

R220 crore required to achieve the target

R100 crore made available by Delhi government

R55 crore received from Central government under Swacch Bharat Mission

Balance requirement to be raised by DUSIB in 2016-17