Dhaka city’s public toilets are a municipal disgrace. In the first place, very few are provided for residents by the two city corporations, but to make matters worse, those few which they do oversee are poorly maintained and highly insanitary.
There is no excuse for appalling conditions in public toilets. The city is not short of water and labour with which to clean facilities. The risk of water-borne disease spreading and the pollution and public nuisance exacerbated by the lack of adequate sanitation is too high to ignore.
The city corporations badly need to increase the meagre amount of funding, reported to be only TK55lakh for the whole of Dhaka, which they make available for public toilets in their development budgets.
Ensuring access to proper sanitation is a basic obligation of government from which everyone benefits. At the citywide level, this clearly requires better co-ordination of municipal services like waste disposal and water supply. The benefits of larger public works such as scheduled investments in sewage plants, are lost however if individuals do not have access to adequate toilet facilities in the first place.
Investment in new facilities is needed as well as properly maintaining existing ones. Encouragement and incentives can also be given to improve the accessibility and quality of toilets owned and operated by private businesses, such as shopping malls and restaurants, as well as in public spaces.
Municipalities must devote more resources to ensure proper access to sanitation.
