STATUS OF ACCESS TO SANITATION TO URBAN POOR, SEPTEMBER 2012

According to the National Urban Sanitation Policy, as of 2009, 12.04 million (7.87 %) urban households do not have access to latrines and defecate in the open; approx. 18.88 million (27.63%) urban households use either community or shared latrines. 12.47 million (18.5%) households do not have access to a drainage network; 26.83 million (39.8%) households are connected to open drains. The data also shows that the situation is worse in non-notified slums (slums that are on central government land and others not formally recognized by the municipal government) that have no legal tenure status and are therefore not entitled to civic provision of basic services: the percentage of notified and non-notified slums without latrines is 17 percent and 51 percent respectively. More than 37% of the total human excreta generated in urban India are disposed off unsafely.

Since 2010, SELAVIP a private foundation that supports housing projects to shelter very poor families living in cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia has been giving grants to SPARC to assist poor and vulnerable households that cannot pay their community contribution under the ongoing BSUP projects being implemented by the Alliance in Pune and Puri.

For 2013, SELAVIP had asked NGOs to again submit proposals on the same grounds of supporting very poor families. But this time, SPARC thought of making use of these funds to provide either individual toilet to families who can afford to put in some amount of contribution, renovate & repair existing community toilet blocks or construct new toilet blocks in slums where there are no toilets at all. Over the past 26 years, the Alliance has observed that small neighbourhood associations of the poor, sometimes self-organized and sometimes organized by NGOs, are unable to effectively negotiate with service providers to cater to their needs – be it a water tap, relief against evictions or a toilet. Increasingly, land-based entitlements including sanitation require the aggregation of a very large critical mass of households with unmet needs to make their presence felt and to seek response to their demands.

In order to come up with slums where the project can be implemented, an analysis of the data collected through settlement profiling conducted by the Federation and Mahila Milan was taken into consideration. We took up three cities of Maharashtra –Ahmadnagar (12 settlements), Malegaon (6 settlements) and Nasik (14 settlements) and decided to concentrate on only those settlements where Mahila Milan and Federation have a presence.

What the data analysis says

Ahmadnagar

• 2 toilet blocks need repairs in terms of providing water, electricity connection.
• 4 settlements have no toilets along with insufficient land to construct a new toilet block
• 2 settlements though having community toilets are not sufficient for the population size. Having space to construct new toilet blocks provision of individual toilets is also a possibility

Malegaon

• 1 settlement where communities have enough space to construct individual toilets and can even afford to pay for it if given a loan.
• 4 settlements have no toilets thus defecate in the open. Also there is no land to construct new toilet blocks.

Nasik

• 6 settlements have individual toilets
• 4 toilet blocks need repairing – fitting doors, taps, water & electricity connections
• 1 settlement which has no toilet facility therefore people defecate in the open