HYDERABAD: For a small scale entrepreneur from the Old City, Insha Begum fights several battles on a daily basis. Her usual day comprises traveling far and wide buying cloths for stitching and ready-made dresses, and occasionally delivering the finished products as well. Ask her, what troubles her the most. Pat comes the answer: lack of accessible toilets.
“Though the distance between my residence in Barkas and Charminar is around seven kilometres, the long wait for bus easily delay me by half-an-hour or more. On my return home, even if I badly need to use a toilet, I don’t have access to one,” she said. According to GHMC data, there are 13 public toilets across Old City. Most of them are Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) toilets. However, apart from three well-maintained toilets near Charminar, most of the toilets are in unusable conditions. Some of them, like the only public toilet in Chandrayangutta, are in dilapidated state and have now become home to stray dogs.
On the contrary, Vijay Kumar, a health and sanitation official with GHMC, when contacted, claimed that two toilets at Chandrayangutta and Yakutpura meant for women, are well-maintained and usable.
Even areas like Ghous Nagar, Jahangirabad, Chatrinaka and the vicinity around Lal Darwaza do not have a single public toilet. Shockingly, the public toilet meant for women near Mecca Masjid is built in such a way that if a woman wants to use it, she will have to cross through urinals meant for men first.
A labourer, Laxmi, said, “I work with my husband at a construction site near Shalibanda. My employer’s wife often makes me run errands for her after a tough day at work. I have to commute through the city right after the work and there is literally no toilet I can use at such a time.”Expressing her discontent about the situation in Old City, activist Lubna Sarwath also hinted at the lack of toilets at TSRTC bus depot at Mehdipatnam. “Imagine the plight of women bus conductors who have no toilets to go to when the bus reaches the depot,” she said.
Moreover, some women activists shared their helplessness in getting the civic authorities to make efforts in the direction.Sameena from Shaheen, a women’s rights organisation in Old City, said, “In November, 2016, we had conducted a survey about the number of public toilets in Old City. Finding that the crisis of toilets here is so grave, we had submitted an application to GHMC demanding construction of toilets with the signature of 200 Old City women. Little changed after that as GHMC built a few mobile and BOT toilets in Old City seeing such a massive demand from women, yet the situation of lack of public toilets in this part remains pitiable till date.”
9 new toilets to come up
At present, GHMC has proposed the construction of nine public toilets in the South Zone of the city. Out of these, the officials claim, construction work for two toilets in Mailardevpally and near Mahbubnagar Bus Stop will be executed within two weeks.