For Panaji’s urban poor, access to toilets a daily problem

PANAJI: It is 3.45pm and a four-year-old girl is playing alone on the dusty road that leads to the hutments lining St Inez creek. Behind her, a 24-year-old youth unashamedly relieves himself against a coconut tree. And that lays bare the requirement that Panaji’s urban poor are deprived of.
TOI recently highlighted Goa’s dismal performance in eradicating open defecation and it is no surprise that Panaji mirrors the state’s inadequacy. “There are no toilets here. People go out,” said Kausar Ibrahim when asked if the hutments behind the sewage treatment plant at Tonca had sewerage connections.
Corporation of the City of Panaji’s (CCP) City Sanitation Plan - 2015 shows that 2.6% of the city’s residents have to rely on community toilets.
Just behind Campal along the St Inez creek, over 80 households jostle for space on a narrow strip of land. And with just one community toilet, women have a hard time.
“We are waiting for the candidates to come. Their assistants came to ask us to vote but the main candidates have not shown their faces,” says a lady as she sits in the narrow lane that forms the sole access for the hutments.
There are four prominent candidates in the fray for the Panaji bypolls but the contest is between BJP’s Sidharth Kuncalienker and Congress’s Atanasio Monserrate.
The city’s low income communities are defined by their temporary or semi-permanent construction. The Rajiv Awas Yojana Household & Socio-Economic report puts 2,517 households in this category with nearly 9,000 residents. These houses have access to public water and electricity, but supply is erratic. Sewage is directly discharged in water bodies or drains.
Residents are employed as CCP workers, semi-skilled contractual labourers or maids but despite being an integral part of the city, they find no mention in the ambitious Smart City plan.
“What is the use of the Smart City for us if we can’t get toilets? Toilets are our biggest problems. People are also talking about unemployment,” said Sailesh Gawde, a youth from Campal. One of the aims of the Smart City Mission was to ensure access to basic services. “Water comes for a short time, sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes one and a half hour,” U Rodrigues said.
So will they vote for change? Traditionally, these pockets have backed Monserrate. While Monserrate may have never represented Panaji, he has dominated CCP. “Many of them got jobs as CCP workers through his councillors and they don’t have bigger ambitions than this. All they want are jobs,” says a grassroots political observer.