Going potty in the park

On the morning of Independence Day, I was doing my breathing exercises in a quiet corner of the Hauz Khas district park. Just as I inhaled deeply, I realised my choice of venue was not a good one. There was a furtive scuffling in the bushes near me, and then two little kids ran out pulling up their scruffy pants, dirty bottles of water in hand. "Hey," I said, "what are you doing?" The children stopped in their tracks. They looked like they were barely seven or eight years in age. "We just came here to do our morning job," said one timidly. "We come here every day! You can't stop us - this is a public place!" said the other. I pointed in the direction of the public toilets that had been installed in the park during the Commonwealth Games. "Why don't you use these toilets?" The kids shuffled uncomfortably. "We are scared to go there," said the timid one. "Anyway, they are only meant for rich people like you - not for people like us..." said the other.

It turned out that the kids lived in an unauthorised slum that had developed inside the park, perhaps during the Commonwealth Games. They said that they lived in makeshift tents and in conditions of, what seemed to be impossible crowding. Having been a regular at the park for over a decade, I wondered how an entire slum had grown within its womb without my getting even a whiff of it. I asked the kids where they bathed and how their parents managed their loo matters. They said that the gates of the public toilets were locked when the park was closed. "That is the time when our parents come home from work. So they rarely use the public toilet either," they said. "The trees and bushes make for good cover. All the elders go there. There is a pipeline that we all use to bathe under," the boys said. Many of the children, however, preferred to patronise the manicured park for its green lawns and view. "The other day, I was squatting under a giant bush and saw a peacock dance!" said one of them excitedly. All they had to do, they said, was to be careful to stay out of public gaze.

As I moodily completed my morning walk, I recalled the Baseline Survey conducted by Mission Convergence - a flagship project of the Delhi government. According to this survey, as many as 56 per cent of all children living in slums and unauthorised colonies in Delhi defecated in the open. Most did it because they didn't have easy access to community toilets. But defecating in the open was no walk in the park, I thought, remembering the kids I'd just met. It made kids that much more vulnerable to physical, verbal and sexual abuse. Moreover, open defecation on a widespread scale posed serious health challenges - not just to the kids I'd just met, but also to the affluent neighbourhoods nearby.

As I walked around the park crowded with well-heeled fitness freaks, I tried to look through its thick forest cover to spot the slum. I couldn't, but I knew it was there. It began to drizzle and I thought uncomfortably of all the excreta that would get washed into our already filthy waterways and ground water. Thanks to Delhi's burgeoning population, more and more slums are now rubbing shoulders with the capital's wealthier neighbourhoods, bringing their sanitation and public health problems right to the doorsteps of the rich. Maybe it will take the inevitable meeting of the two twains, before people like us to react when people like them raise a stink...