We raid restaurants for cockroaches but never raid the roadside. Public hygiene runs entirely on faith and fumes. Even after so many years of being a free nation, points out Binu Alex.
Key Points
- India has built millions of toilets, yet public sanitation remains a major challenge across highways, villages and cities.
- Toilet construction schemes often fail when contractors overlook essential plumbing, septic tanks, water supply and actual usability.
- Unsafe sanitation disproportionately affects women, who often have limited opportunities to access private spaces after dark.
- Public health improvements historically emerged when governments recognised that poor sanitation could affect wealthy communities as well.
- India's sanitation challenge ultimately reflects social attitudes, with citizens often expecting the government to solve problems they collectively perpetuate.
So many years gone, and we're still holding out for 2047 as our big arrival date.
Not because the government hasn't done anything. It's because we haven't done enough.
Let's take public hygiene.
It isn't written into any rulebook I know of. We just assume it happens by magic.
You've probably read about Maharashtra's FDA raiding Mumbai's famous eateries. Cockroaches, expired stock, licenses cancelled on the spot.
Now even Bangalore's five-star hotels are competing with the unhygienic ones.
In the middle of all this, I think street food is actually the cleanest option. It's finished the same day. Nothing carries over to tomorrow.
All they really need is a clean plate.
Someone should still tell kitchens to behave. What we eat will always be under watch.
But nobody raids a toilet. There's no FDA for that.
We've built millions of toilets in this country. And yet the morning view from any highway, at dawn, hasn't moved an inch. At least, not until a few years ago.
You'd think this is the government's failure.
It isn't. It's ours.
A few years back, my friend Abey and I rode out with fifty motorcycles to Nalsarovar. We crossed the Ahmedabad border at 4 am.
The road was pitch black. Our headlights swept the shoulders and lit up rows of people, squatting.
For one confused second, I thought we'd ridden into some very early, very committed town hall meeting.
Then it made sense. Just a village, doing what villages do every morning.
All men. Every single one.
The women go further away. In the dark. Alone.
A man steps out whenever he pleases. A woman gets one narrow, risky window before sunrise.
Half the horror stories out of UP and Haryana have this one plain fact sitting underneath them. No safe toilet, no safety.
So the big toilet-building campaign made sense on paper. Did it actually work?
The one truly unstoppable industry in India is the contractor economy. Announce a scheme, and the real winners are the men pouring the concrete.
Here's a story from 2019. An office boy told me his village had finally got its sanitation upgrade.
A team turned up, built a structure by afternoon, lined the family up for a photo, collected the signatures, left.
His family still goes to the fields.
Turns out the contractors installed a ceramic bowl. Forgot the septic tank. Forgot the plumbing. Forgot the water.
The family now stores grain in it.
We didn't build toilets. We built photo studios shaped like toilets.
Remember the broom selfies? The middle class flooded the Internet, brand-new brooms in hand, terribly pleased with themselves.
Meanwhile the men who actually clear our garbage, every single morning, watched quietly and went back to work.
Sanitation has a history, if anyone's interested.
You can measure a civilisation by how it handles its own waste. Rome ran a massive empire and still got flattened by plagues nobody understood.
Crowd people together, disease follows. Venice eventually worked this out and gave the world the word 'quarantine'. Forty days, ships held offshore, nobody let in till the sickness passed.
Why India's Rich Still Ignore Public Sanitation
We only learned that lesson properly during Covid. When we were the ones locked inside.
During the Industrial Revolution, the West figured out something uncomfortable. The rich couldn't ignore the poor's living conditions forever, because cholera doesn't check your status or address before it walks in.
Public health became urgent. Purely out of self-interest.
That particular lesson skipped us entirely.
Our wealthy just assumed the smell would stay on the other side of the compound wall.
I think about this every time I'm on a highway.
Why can't we build a proper public restroom? This thought first hit me in Washington, years ago.
My brother picked me up for a 500- kilometre midnight drive to North Carolina. I was jet-lagged, running on bad Starbucks coffee, after a 19 hour flight.
We stopped at a highway rest area. It looked like a five-star hotel bathroom. Shower stalls. Fresh towels.
You pay for it. But it exists.
Our highway toilets, meanwhile, are run by dhabas. You wade through a greasy kitchen to reach a stall that has never once met a mop.
Will corporate money ever fix this? I doubt it. All that CSR budget should have. It didn't.
We still treat cleaning as somebody else's caste, somebody else's problem. We build self-driving cars and still send a human in with bare hands to clear waste.
Bezwada Wilson has spent years campaigning to end manual scavenging. That the campaign still needs fighting tells you exactly how far we are from calling ourselves a Vishwaguru.
Finding a toilet anywhere in India is a small daily adventure.
Near a mall, you're covered. Anywhere else, you're improvising. A few highways now have proper Food Parks with decent facilities, which honestly feels like progress.
The rest of the world just runs different rules on the same problem.
I remember walking down New York's Fifth Avenue, near the big glass Apple Store. Shopfronts had signs warning tourists off their bathrooms.
I asked a street vendor where to go. He pointed at the cube.
I walked in, got nervous past the security desk, assumed I had to buy something first. Bought a thirty-dollar charging cable I didn't need.
Reached the toilet. It had a longer queue than the sales floor.
All that, for nothing. Thirty dollars, for one pee.
We Build Monuments, But Not Toilets
In Europe, they just charge you two euros. Same price as an espresso. Or a beer. Buy the coffee, rent the washroom. One stone, two birds. I used to like that rule. I always used it.
Try that here. The neighbourhood tea stall has no toilet. The owner uses the alley behind it.
If you've ever driven past the Income Tax office near Gandhi Bridge in Ahmedabad, you know the tree.
A big one, right against the boundary wall, at the busiest junction in the city. Used as a public urinal by hundreds of men, every single day. Openly.
The tax officers inside didn't mind. The pedestrians didn't mind. The men certainly didn't mind.
Because within ten kilometres, there wasn't a single public toilet to send them to instead.
We can build the tallest statue in the world. We still can't manage a clean place to relieve ourselves along the way.
But that's our DNA, isn't it. We wait for the Sarkar to do it for us.
We rarely think to just do it ourselves.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
