Swachh without Swachh Bharat
- Shruti Sundar Ray
- Jan 2, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 16, 2020
The Asalpha hillock in suburban Mumbai stands as an example of the robust communities that reside in homegrown neighbourhoods while problems, such as a lack of accessible toilets, persist
The soft winter sunlight casts the sharp-but-wrinkled features of 80-year-old Sheena Angaram Suvarna in an other-worldly glow, as he rests against the yellow-painted wall of his front porch observing anyone who passes by with keen all-knowing eyes. Inside the door, his daughter-in-law home-maker Jayalaxmi Shailesh Suvarna pitters around a group of children seated on the black-and-white checkerboard-tiled floor, as they excitedly show her the colourful paper decorations that they have been making for the neighbourhood New Year’s Eve party.
“Sundance is the only problem we have here,” says Jayalaxmi, who is originally from Mangalore, using a colloquialism for toilets to refer to what she believes is the most pressing concern in the Trimurti Housing Society, situated on the Asalpha donger or hillock, off the Pipeline Road straddling the Saki Naka and Ghatkopar suburbs of Mumbai. She explains that since the neighbourhood houses have been built on a hillock, water drains away easily and there are no problems of waterlogging or mosquitoes.
Trimurti Housing Society is one of the over 20 housing societies that the myriad constructions on the hillock have been organised into by the residents. The Asalpha hillock and the contiguous Pereira Wadi on the same hillock, identified by varied names, find place as designated slum clusters in the Ward and Village Wise Slum Cluster Map 2015 of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, Mumbai (SRA).
The District Census Handbook for Mumbai (Suburban) ranks administrative section 78, which includes the Asalpha village and other neighbouring locales, as the second most populous in the district with a population of over 5.8 lakh. The broader region constituting the ‘L’ ward has the highest population density, poorest sex ratio and second-lowest literacy rate among municipal wards in Mumbai (Suburban) district.
The Asalpha hillock, visible from the Mumbai Metro Versova–Ghatkopar Line and the nearby Asalpha Metro station, is stacked with colourful Lego-like housing structures arranged in an ad-hoc labyrinthine pattern. Multiple stone-paved stairways alight from the hillock, providing access to and from the Pipeline Road. No single path leads all the way to the top-rung houses. Instead, the maze-like route inflects into side-lanes that traverse through the verandahs of other houses before opening up to stairways again. In some parts, the path even involves descending a flight of steps to get to the correct upward, often steep, trail.
“When I came here in 1985, the whole donger was so empty that I used to feel scared at night. Over the years, more and more houses started cropping up,” says 75-year-old retired driving instructor and resident of Sahyadri Society, Ramashraya Pandey who hails from Uttar Pradesh. With more people, the early shacks became permanent structures, he explains. Today, most houses on Asalpha hillock have concrete walls and asbestos-sheet roofs.
The hillock, which used to have the characteristic appearance of a Mumbai slum marked by greying walls and blue tarpaulin-covered roofs received a makeover in late 2017 when volunteers from a city-based NGO painted the exterior walls of the houses in bright colours, with assorted bits of artwork here and there. Now dubbed by netizens as the ‘Positano of India’, an allusion to the colourful cliff-side village on the Amalfi coast of Italy, the Asalpha neighbourhood garners many shutterbug foreign tourists eager for a good click. Although not unwelcome, the intervention has been of little consequence to the lives of residents and has served more to provide visual relief to outsiders, especially to Metro train commuters.
Although the Asalpha donger locality has been mapped by the SRA as a ‘slum’, residents prefer to refer to their neighbourhood as a collection of ‘housing societies’.
The 2011 Census of India defines a ‘slum’, for the purpose of Census, as a residential area where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to safety and health.
Not unlike other ‘slums’ in Mumbai, the Asalpha donger, meets some of these criteria. But as argued by Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove in The Guardian, ‘slum’ is a loaded term and many of Mumbai’s informal settlements are better described as ‘homegrown neighbourhoods’.
The buildings on the Asalpha hillock vary in size from 8 feet by 12 feet rooms to larger multi-roomed houses. Some houses have high ceilings allowing for partitions to create two storeys within the same structure. Although designed without ample cross-ventilation, the houses remain airy owing to their position on the hillside. “Our house is small but I love it,” says 17-year-old resident of Shivshambhu Housing Society, Ritika Londhe, who is a social media event promoter for a popular Andheri-based nightclub. She adds, “Nothing beats the view.”
The criss-crossing stone pathways are dotted with dark-green waste disposal bins, that are used habitually as evidenced by the near-absence of garbage littering any open surface. Many narrow lanes form an extension of the adjoining houses and are swept and cleaned with water on a daily basis by the residents, lending a spick-and-span look to the entire neighbourhood.
During the day, resident women can often be seen alone or huddled together doing chores like cleaning floors, washing utensils or cutting vegetables. Women of the locality are also often engaged in income-boosting economic activities like making papad or making scouring pads out of plastic mesh. Teenagers, sitting on the stairways, playing games or watching videos on their mobile devices is another common day-time sight.
Most households, barring those on the uppermost reaches of the hillock, have a direct water connection that receives water for three hours every day. Large blue-coloured PVC drums, supplied with neon-yellow water pipes, can be seen outside most houses for storage of water for use during the rest of the day. The municipal water supply is pumped up the hillock using motors but the upper-most houses face a water-pressure problem. Women from these houses end up having to collect water daily in cannisters from lower-lying water spigots.
Notwithstanding, as these women line up to fill water from the communal spigot, their primary complain is not that of water but of toilets. When asked about the Central Government’s flagship Swachh Bharat Abhiyan whose aims include the construction of toilets, 30-year-old Tanuja More, who has been a resident of the Asalpha hillock since her wedding nine years ago, says, “Swachh Bharat did not come up our donger.” She explains that individual sewer lines have not been dug up to every house, so people have to use the common sarvajanik or community toilets, that have been built in every society in the past.
Society residents carry water in buckets to these community toilets, that do not have a separate water connection. Although the toilets are located away from the houses, all residents—men, women and children alike, use the toilets only and the entire hillock neighbourhood is open defecation free. The societies have a sense of ownership towards the toilets and they are kept reasonably clean.
The absence of toilets in homes is especially a problem, for the elderly who have a difficulty climbing up and down stairs, and their care-givers. For instance, using the community toilet which is two flights of stairs away poses a double challenge for 65-year-old Tara Kannojiya, who not only has to use it herself but also helps her 90-year-old dependent sister, with irregular bowel movements. The hillside location of the neighbourhood is a disadvantage, when it comes to accessibility.
While many residents, especially women, lament the lack of toilets within their homes, some prefer the community toilets, citing the unnecessary construction activity and the small house sizes. “We live in an 8 by 12 feet room. Where will we fit a toilet?” says 41-year-old resident Prasanna Rau, who lives in his wife’s maternal house and is currently unemployed.
“Those who want can build a toilet and those who don’t need not as per their convenience but the government should give a sewer line first,” reasons Tanuja. She explains that all political representatives promise that they will build toilets while campaigning for votes but no individual toilets have been built so far. Prakash Devji More, Municipal Councillor for ‘L’ ward, belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party whose constituency areas include Asalpha, says, “Digging and placing sewer pipes on the donger is tricky. But it is on the agenda for the next budget. Once the sewer lines are laid, progress on toilets can happen quickly.”
Women residents of varying ages of the Vishwa Sai Housing Society, situated at the top of the Asalpha hillock, stand joking around together as they wait to fill water in their pots and cannisters from the common spigot. Their amusement is evident as they reflect with cynical confidence that no political leader would make good on promises to bring water or sewers to their doorstep. Suvarna Bhojne, who is unsure of her age but guesses it would be around 75, has only disdain for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet Swachh Bharat mission. “Send our pictures to Modiji. Nothing will happen,” she says.
This sentiment is echoed by the 80-year-old former tailor Sheena Angaram, who joins his daughter-in-law indoors in watching the neighbourhood children make party decorations for New Year’s Eve. “Because of my back problem, the doctor advised English Sundance for me,” he says, referring to a Western commode-type toilet. Interspersed with rants about Maharashtra’s fragile political alliances and the impact of climate change, he explains that Corporation workers had assured him that they would set up a toilet in his home and accordingly, he had bought the commode apparatus also but no sewer pipes were laid even after a year. Instead, he has to routinely make the trek down the hillock to the main road where his daughter has a house with a Western commode-type flush toilet. “Maybe writing about our issues will help,” he says, not with but not without hope.
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