By Ila Ananya
Hyderabad has very few public loos for women. Extremely few. According to a new report, out of the 184 public toilets that have recently been installed, less than half are for women. According to the same news report, all the 47 bio-urinals built in the city in 2015, were for men. And out of the total 1000 bio-urinals that the civic body has been planning, only 200 are marked for women.
I haven’t lived in Hyderabad for the last six years, but I know this is true. There is a public toilet a few roads down by house which is only for men. When I was twelve and out with friends from my neighbourhood, walking down random roads because we had nowhere else to go, the boys would all run off to pee after an hour. The rest of us girls would huddle together outside the public loo that was only for men, whispering that we really needed to pee. And then the boys would come back, and we’d walk off again, all pee conversations stopped.
The numbers remind us of the Right to Pee campaign that was started by Sujata Khandekar and Supriya Sonar in Mumbai back in 2011. Back then, in an interview with The Ladies Finger, Khandekar had said, “There are fewer or no public urinals and toilets for women because women, by traditional gender definitions, are supposed to stay at home.” Then she went on to tell us stories about sabziwalis and other working women who have trained themselves not to urinate for eight to ten hours a day. An urban planner that Times of India spoke to said the same thing–“The GHMC has followed a 1:2 ratio, to build toilets for men and women in the city. This ratio is baseless and the authorities have simply assumed that there are fewer women out on the roads, in comparison with the number of men. The GHMC itself employs around 20,000 female staff who sweep city roads.”
There was even a petition doing the rounds last year demanding loos for women on highways. Of course the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has done a bunch of things to try and stop people (men) from peeing on the roads. Including garlanding people peeing in the open, in what they’re calling a Gandhigiri way of dealing with the issue. Maybe with all these productive ideas, they should also build public toilets for women.
You can read some stories women have told us about their worst pee experiences, particularly those that would have been much better if they had access to a public toilet here and here.