NEW DELHI — Count the number of public toilets for women inIndia, or the availability of something as basic as low-cost sanitary napkins, and the invisibility of women’s needs becomes apparent. But as campaigns like the “No Toilet, No Bride” effort in the northern state of Haryana make an impact, India’s women are beginning to demand basic rights.
This isn’t often easy. Just a few kilometers away from showrooms that advertise gold faucets and offer ways of turning bathrooms into glamour rooms, the women of Kusumpur, a slum area in Delhi, are lining up to use public toilets in distinctly unglamorous conditions.
Kusumpur has almost no private toilets and only one public toilet for every 500 women. As Usha Kumari, a longtime resident, says, the impact on these women’s lives is stark.
“If you have to go to school or a job, you have to be up early to line up for water from the common tap to wash, then for the toilet,” she said. “Some days I have to use the flying toilet and freshen up in the Metro bathroom.”
The “flying toilet” is a common solution in Indian slums to the lack of bathrooms. Women with no access to clean public toilets often use a plastic bag, then deposit the bag and its contents in the trash later.
In a 2009 study, the Center for Civil Society, a nonprofit organization, estimated that the capital had only 132 public toilets for women, many of them barely functioning, compared with 1,534 for men. The effect of this, in Delhi and across urban India, is to severely limit the mobility of women and their ability to work efficiently.
