Sanitation Without Dignity

India has invested heavily in sanitation. From the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan to the Swachh Bharat Mission launched in 2014, the country articulated an ambitious goal: to end open defecation and make India clean. Governments have showcased impressive numbers, from millions of household toilets built to thousands of villages declared Open Defecation Free. Yet nearly a decade later, the lived reality remains sobering. Cleanliness is no longer just a policy target; it is a test of our civic sense, public priorities and commitment to basic human dignity.

What the broad trends reveal is unsettling. Public toilets have expanded in number across urban and semi-urban India, and visible littering has reduced in some prominent locations. But access does not automatically translate into usability. For millions of citizens, especially women, the elderly, children and persons with disabilities, public toilets remain spaces of anxiety rather than relief. Many facilities are poorly lit, inadequately cleaned, short of water, or simply locked. The result is a silent but widespread avoidance of public toilets, forcing people to seek private establishments or, worse, to delay relief at serious cost to health and dignity.

Why does this matter so urgently? Toilets are not luxuries. They are foundational to public health, human dignity, gender safety and environmental welfare. Improved sanitation has proven to help avert tens of thousands of infant deaths annually by reducing disease transmission. However, construction alone is not the whole answer. A toilet that is built and then left to decay, physically and functionally, serves merely as a civic embarrassment.

The paradox is stark: despite crores spent on sanitation campaigns, branding, and construction targets, many public toilets remain little more than foul pits, especially in low-income neighbourhoods and informal settlements where they are most needed and least maintained. Even cities celebrated for cleanliness mask everyday neglect, a contradiction mirrored in government offices, temples, tourist hubs, cultural centres, and sacred riverbanks, where filth and unusable sanitation coexist with allocated budgets, devotion, and civilisational pride—revealing a troubling civic paradox of reverence without responsibility and symbolism without sanitation.

Bus stands, railway stations and petrol bunks remain the most visible examples of a wider malaise across India’s public infrastructure. As the arteries of daily movement, these transport hubs mostly reveal a broader pattern of neglect, where public toilet conditions remain persistently poor and unhygienic facilities are the norm rather than the exception. Traveller experiences are both comic and distressing. Pay-and-use toilets charge five to ten rupees, sometimes more, often exploiting travellers from other states, while offering no water, no tissue and levels of filth that deter even the most desperate users. Matters are worsened by the near-total absence of publicly displayed service rates, maintenance duties and contract details, which should be mandatory in the local language, English and Hindi, leaving users unable to demand accountability and rendering these facilities purposeless.

Worse still are persistent allegations of corruption and fund misuse. In Chennai, political leaders and civil society groups have flagged gross irregularities in sanitation projects, with per-seat maintenance costs soaring after privatisation but no discernible improvement in hygiene or user experience; over Rs 1,000 crore is said to have been spent without visibly transforming public toilets, a clear failure of accountability. A similar gap between claims and reality is evident in Delhi and Ghaziabad, where many municipal toilets remain crumbling, locked or filthy, lacking water, staff and basic upkeep, forcing residents—especially women and daily-wage workers—to avoid them or defecate in the open, even after a 2024 Delhi High Court order for independent audits exposed widespread unusability in 2025. The neglect is cruellest at the rural fringes: villages once declared Open Defecation Free have quietly regressed as toilets collapsed, and, for instance, in Karnataka’s Koppal district, long-defunct public toilets have pushed families, particularly women, back to roadside defecation, underscoring how declarations on paper have failed to deliver lived dignity.

All these numbers and narratives point to one unavoidable truth. Building toilets is not the hardest part; maintaining them is. Maintenance requires a consistent water supply, reliable cleaning staff, effective waste disposal systems, regular inspections and, above all, accountability. A public toilet cannot be treated as a one-time public relations milestone. It is living infrastructure, as essential as safe drinking water or electricity.

Yet the responsibility does not rest with governments alone. We must also look inward. How many of us would tolerate a bathroom in our own home that reeks, attracts flies or is never cleaned? We bathe daily and maintain hygienic kitchens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we sanitised obsessively, washing hands, wiping surfaces and scrubbing floors. Today, that discipline often disappears in public spaces. The reason is simple. Cleanliness has not yet been internalised as a civic virtue that extends beyond slogans and campaigns.

This reflects a deeper cultural and behavioural challenge. Civic sense does not emerge from construction alone; it grows from respect for oneself, for others and for shared spaces. It means not littering, not vandalising public property, not sabotaging drains and not normalising filth. Countries that excel in sanitation do so not merely because of higher budgets, but because cleanliness is embedded in public consciousness. India, too, must cultivate this ethic.

Public toilets should be maintained with the same seriousness and regularity as bathrooms at home. Family toilets are cleaned daily. Why then do we tolerate neglect in public restrooms? Where is the outrage when such neglect persists even in spaces we already recognise as chronically mismanaged? Audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General have repeatedly found high levels of passenger dissatisfaction with train toilets, citing clogged seats, inadequate water supply and dirty washbasins. Such findings should provoke reform, not resignation.

The solution must be multifaceted: municipal bodies should institutionalise regular, unannounced inspections with clear benchmarks and penalties, ensure transparent tracking and independent audits of sanitation funds, and share the burden of upkeep beyond poorly paid workers through technology, community participation and civic monitoring. Swachh Bharat was never just about building toilets but transforming mindsets, a shift that depends on everyday civic responsibility—using, maintaining and respecting public facilities while holding institutions accountable. India has the resources and capacity to get this right; clean toilets are not mere concrete structures, but reflections of our civilisation, and a modern, dignified nation must ensure its sanitation finally matches its ambitions.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a policy analyst and a columnist