While ensuring sanitation facilities, we need to learn to keep them clean as well

There seems to be a lot of noise on toilets of late. With the government stressing on steps to provide adequate numbers of them, the topic is in the news.

Ample sanitation facilities are indeed a dire requirement. However, the success of such ambitious plans lies not only in constructing lavatories, but also in educating the public on them. Not just the benighted demographic that’s often derided as slovenly, but also the section that is considered literate, and so fastidious. For, sadly advanced literacy rates and higher incomes do not always spell a proportionate level of civic sense.

We Indians have long been touted as an unhygienic population. While most of these comments have been and can be dismissed as stereotyping, the slur over our social ethics is irrefutable as long as the proof glares out of dirty public toilets, rubbish heaps and impromptu roadside lavatories. And while we are, by and large, a rule-abiding demographic outside our own borders, the stark lack of civil responsibility occasionally surfaces, especially when we are likely to get away with it.

For instance, I happened to witness a recent washroom disagreement between a janitor and a passenger at the Amsterdam airport.

The lady (a most respectable-looking Indian who later boarded the same flight to Mumbai as I) had taken her two children into the cubicle with her, where, as it turned out, one child used the toilet bowl, and the other used the floor. And little had been done to contain the mess, except to drop a couple of squares of toilet tissue over the area.

An annoyed janitor countered this with a loud, “Lady, this no good. He no young. You’ve to ‘learn’ your child.” In spite of the sundry verb misuse, the meaning was clear enough. The mother had to learn the rudiments of cleanliness and hygiene, and she had to teach her child. The mother appeared disdainfully unapologetic, probably considering the boy’s age as the prime reason. He looked to be about seven — presumably young enough for toilet accidents.

And that made me wonder about the various other ‘everyday’ occurrences that highlight the woeful lack of civic education. The many train crossings that are considered outdoor toilets for the multitude waiting for the signals to change. The airport washrooms that are often no cleaner than their counterparts in less affluent areas, and waiting room seats that are stained with the remains of innumerable meals. The ‘paan’-stained walls, which are often plastered with pictures of divinity as a desperate defence against the red tide.

There is sheer irony in cleaning the front porch of a house twice a day, and the toilets just twice a month. The sad fact is also that many schools, in spite of mandatory sanitation certificates, still function with unusable toilets, or worse, sans toilets.

These are issues generally ignored across generations — by the current cohort, which has probably reached an impasse over unsanitary conditions; as well as the future generation, which must perforce learn to ignore them if they are to survive long years of school toilets, university hostels and public transport facilities.

Too often, the discrepancy is blamed on ‘tradition’. Or rather, on misconceptions that masquerade as customs — extensions of beliefs that were right in a different era, but have to be adapted to fit a new age.

The opinion that outdoor toilets are more geared towards nature, is one. Likewise, the idea that indoor toilets are unhealthy, and that cleaning toilets is below one’s dignity. Of course, with increasing awareness, some of these misconceptions are already gone, but persistent beliefs do remain.

And it would take some effort to convince everyone otherwise. Untreated human waste does not turn into instant manure, especially if the ground surface is covered with tar or concrete; toilets both inside and outside the house will remain unhygienic if left uncleaned, and wet floors are not necessarily clean — they more often mean slippery accidents and waterborne diseases.

Thankfully, perhaps it’s going to be an upward swing now, especially since the notion that bathrooms are much more than holes in the ground has finally caught on. But the idea has to trickle down and across the population, along with the moral sense that what’s ‘public’ still counts as ‘ours’. Ensuring adequate toilets is an extended process that goes beyond simply raising brick and mortar structures.

For starters, sanitary facilities should be clean, and maintained so. Which should be an easy enough task — in a country with such a surplus of workforce. An army of janitors and supervisors can easily be raised without impinging on their availability for other, supposedly important jobs.

The real difficulty would be in educating the populace on their social accountability. The cleaners need to realise that only a job well done would mean a job well paid. The users should ensure that the facilities are actually used, and remain clean after use — irrespective of urgent chores that veto roadside expurgation over lavatory queues, and in spite of vital tasks that simply cannot wait while the flush handle is engaged for a brief while.

Civic sense is not always in-built — it has to be acquired. Cleanliness and hygiene certainly can be taught, and imbibed. In the words of the Dutch janitor I overheard, “You must learn them.”

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