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"Don't flush." M K Malhotra, a resident of Delhi's Vasant Kunj, has put this instruction on his toilet. Six members of his family use this toilet at least three times a day and ten litres of water goes down the drain with every flush. In a water-scarce locality, Malhotra can hardly afford this basic sanitation practice. "In fact, it's a luxury," he says.
In reality things don't work so well. Firstly, only a small percentage of Indian towns and cities actually have sewage treatment plants. The Central Pollution Control Board points out that out of 22,900 million litres a day (MLD) generated as wastewater, only 5,900 MLD is treated - less than 3 per cent.
So where does the rest (untreated) with its load of dangerous pathogens go? Often untreated sewage is dumped straight into rivers or other surface bodies. The environmental and health costs are enormous: our rivers and our children are dying. This is because large amounts of water are being taken away from the rivers and used to carry excreta. The 'diluted' excreta is drained into rivers. Most Indian cities are based on river basins and use these rivers as sources for drinking water and waste disposal.
Sewage treatment is also expensive. The Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) has estimated that to provide wastewater treatment in 10 large cities (population of 1.5 million and above) it would cost Rs 1,400-1,600 crore depending on the technology used for sewage management. The land requirement in these 10 cities would be 1,137 hectares. This estimate does not include the infrastructure, which needs to be in place as well as ongoing operating costs. Another assessment by the CPCB says that treating sewage for 23 metro cities would cost Rs 2,750 crore at 1994 prices.
What is even more worrying is that a minority of Indians, who have access to sewers, cause water pollution. According to National Sample Survey Organisation's 54th round survey, 74 per cent of urban population use toilets, but only 22.5 per cent are connected to sewers and 35.2 per cent use septic tanks.
In Indian cities a large part of the population lives in slums and peri-urban area and these settlements quite often have no "legitimacy" and are not factored in any urban sewerage planning. Yet in a city like Mumbai, half of its nearly 12 million residents are either slum dwellers or homeless. They occupy six per cent of the city's land, living in cramped squatter areas with little or no access to sewage and sanitation facilities. When they are included, often under pressure from NGOs, the first thought is to build flush systems and sewerage, which proves to be economically unsuitable. In a slum, up to 500 people could share one toilet. Moreover, very little thought is given to their upkeep. For example, in Delhi the MCD is the implementing agency for low cost sanitation schemes including community toilet complexes. But these don't work most of the time.
The drive to do away with scavenging system - the practice in which toilets not connected to sewers are manually emptied and cleaned - was an opportunity to bring in fresh thinking into toilet designs keeping in mind Indian context. But this never happened. Rather, the government stuck to the flush type latrines. With the passing of the 1993 Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, the conversion of the so-called dry latrines to water seal pour flush latrines got underway. Up to March 2000, Rs 1,339.98 crore had been spent on this scheme, states an appraisal report of the planning commission. Yet, less then eight per cent of the total recorded dry latrines were converted to sanitary ones till the first three years of the Ninth Plan. To meet this huge target of adopting water-intensive technology, the government has to dole out the required money. Funds will be required to not only set up infrastructure needed, but to maintain them, given the growing demand for flush toilets.
Then money will be needed to build sewage treatment facilities. Though industrial pollution in rivers often gets prominence, human sewage is the biggest threat: 80 per cent of pollution in Indian rivers is due to human sewage, says the Planning Commission. The Union ministry of environment and forests (MEF), in its Ninth Plan, fixed a target to set up sewage treatment facilities for 1,591 towns having a population over 20,000, in coordination with Union ministry of urban development and state governments. The question is where will the money come from?
The sewers in Delhi have lost 80 per cent of thier carrying capacity due to age and poor maintenance. This means that only 20 per cent of domestic wastewater is being treated, the rest flows directly into the Yamuna. In the case of major river pollution abatement activity like the Ganga Action Plan, only 13.7 per cent of the targeted sewage treatment capacity has been created.
Already, the costs of treatment are not being met. An indication of this is the price of water. If all the water treatment were taken into account in a city like Delhi, the price of water would be Rs 4.61 per litre. Instead, the Delhi Jal Board is charging just Rs 1.99. Revenue generation is 43 per cent of production costs in Delhi. In Kolkata, it's at a ridiculous 14 per cent, in Nagpur, 48 per cent and for Pune, it is 49 per cent. This is just the cost of treating water to make it fit to drink; none of these figures are inclusive of the cost of treating sewage, before putting it into the rivers.
Another important constraint to service peri-urban areas is that lower-cost technologies usually require a much higher level of user involvement than conventional technology to function properly. Yet engineers, who traditionally play a major role in the formulation of sanitation projects, often have little training or regard for the social mechanics of projects, such as mobilising communities and involving future users, and have little patience for the sheer time it takes to address them.
The Planning Commission points out what it calls the "vicious circle of circumstances" - due to economic non-viability of the urban sewage and sanitation, programmes have failed to cover all the population and due to insufficient funding, operation and maintenance have failed miserably. There has to be a paradigm shift in the way sanitation policies are formulated. The new approach would have to suit the social and geographical factors of the region and be environmentally and economically sustainable. But who will bell the cat?