Death-trap toilets: the hidden dangers of Mumbai's poorest slums

On the morning of 4 February, Harish Tikedar, Ganesh Soni, and Mohammed Isafil Ansari waited in a queue to use the community toilet in the Indira Nagar slum in eastern Mumbai. All of a sudden the floor collapsed, plunging Tikedar, Soni and Ansari into the septic tank 15-feet below.

Two others who also fell – Sirajjudin Turat and Ramakant Kanojia – managed to hold on to the sides until they were rescued.

“I was submerged up to my shoulders in the slush,” says Turat. “I could feel it pulling me down but somehow held on to a slab. Then some people pulled me up and I passed out.”

The five men who were pulled out were unrecognisable, covered in faeces. They were all taken to a nearby hospital but Tikedar, Soni and Ansari did not survive.

In Mumbai’s slums, the simple act of relieving oneself is fraught with danger, especially in the slums of M-East ward where population density is high, and the few public amenities are crumbling.

M-East is the poorest and most deficient in civic services of Mumbai’s 24 administrative wards. It has expanded over the last 15 years but has remained on the periphery of the city’s consciousness and governance systems. The differences between the civic amenities available in the smattering of middle-class apartment blocks and the slums, which dominate M-East, are stark.

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Most of the 100 square feet slum houses do not have sanitation and water facilities, either because applications for individual toilets and taps are pending approval or because the slum is on encroached land, which means that the civic body will not provide any services there.

For sanitation, people in Mumbai pay two to three rupees (£0.02-0.04) to use a community toilet, which generate revenues of 3.6bn rupees (£47m) a year, according to a recent report by the Observer Research Foundation. The poorest of the poor pay more than 10m rupees (£120,000) per day for the most basic necessity, yet the facilities are rarely maintained despite complaints.

Some 78% of community toilets in Mumbai’s slums lack water supply, 58% have no electricity, and many don’t have proper doors or facilities for women to dispose of sanitary napkins. The statistics are worse in M-East.

“The chief minister [of Maharashtra] should order a structural audit of all community and public toilets. All those found deficient must be demolished and reconstructed,” says Dhaval Desai, author of the Observer Research Foundation report. “The long-term solution is to allow slum dwellers to construct individual toilets inside their houses. About 83% of the people we interviewed said they would spend the money, but the BMC [Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation] denies permission on technical grounds.” Most of the slums appeared after 2005, which makes them illegal.

“That slums post-2005 are not given water is a sham,” says Rais Shaikh an elected representative to the BMC from M-East, and leader of the Samajwadi party. “All of them get water; by what means is an open secret. If it wants, the BMC can find a way to provide basic rights.”

The majority of slum residents are forced to depend on the thriving informal market, operated by a network of local strongmen that supplies water through tankers and via the unfinished pipe system laid by the civic body. The cost depends on demand and supply, from as high as 40 rupees (£0.48) to as low as five rupees (£0.06 ) for a 40-litre can. When the municipal corporation imposes water cuts in the summer, the cost rises considerably.

Where there is a gap in sanitation services, NGOs step in to construct community toilets, or local MLAs (member of legislative assembly) and MPs contribute money from area development funds. A coterie of contractors usually takes up the construction and management of these community toilets. But they have no accountability to either the BMC or residents, and repeated complaints about sinking floors and full septic tanks go unheeded.

The community toilet that collapsed in the Indira Nagar slum was only 10 years old and was built using the local MLA’s area development fund. The contractor was arrested and booked under the Indian Penal Code on charges including culpable homicide not amounting to murder, but he was eventually set free. He was not available for comment.

The accident is not an isolated one. Across Mumbai, seven people have died and one was left disabled in similar incidents in the last three months.

“There must be guidelines that the BMC enforces for construction, otherwise this kind of death will become routine,” says Razzaq Shaikh, who helped rescue the two survivors. “After an incident, the MLA or MP comes visiting, often with a cheque. But what’s the point? We know life is cheap in Mumbai, but so cheap?”

The benchmark for toilets, adopted as part of India’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan [Clean India Mission], is one toilet for 25 women or 30 men. In M-East, however, the average is one toilet per 190 people, according to surveys by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

“The availability of toilets and tap water is so abysmal that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan is laughable,” says Amita Bhide, dean of the institute’s School of Habitat Studies and head of its M-East ward project. “The state and the BMC has to intervene and be innovative, not sit on applications for individual toilets because there aren’t sewer lines to link to.”

Regular water supply is also a perennial election promise, but despite politician’s campaigning, nothing seems to change in Mumbai’s poorest slums.

“All political parties come here using the water issue as their trump card,” says Syed Lateef. “All of them say that when they come to power, water issues will be resolved. Water pipes have been installed and reinstalled, but we don’t get water. We buy it.”

Additional reporting by Suryasarathi Bhattacharya and Jovita Aranha.

A version of this article first appeared on scroll.in and has been republished with permission. Follow the author @urjourno and @scroll_in on Twitter.

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