From Invisibility towards Justice: The march of the marginalized citizens of Mumbai”

The Right to Pee campaign started as the “Committee of Organisations for Clean, Safe, Free Urinals for Women” in 2011. ⁽³⁾ The issue emerged from a discussion of community activists who were part of the annual Grassroots Leadership Development Program organized by the NGO CORO (Community of Resource Organisations). CORO itself was founded in 1989 by middle class professionals as an adult literacy program for women in the low-income communities of Northeast Mumbai (CORO 2024 b). But the professionals turned activists were inspired by and worked in the context of a long history of urban and rural women’s movements in Maharashtra, many centered in Mumbai (e.g., Desai 2002; Omvedt 1980, Gandhi & Shah 1992). Initially, these movements were affiliated with labor unions and peasants’ and farmers’ movements. The affiliated movements organized poor women to access state resources such as employment guarantee schemes. The autonomous women’s movements grew out of the frustration of women activists with lack of attention to women’s issues in the affiliated movements and the division of activist labor with primarily women activists mobilizing women around women’s issues.

The autonomous women’s movement initially organized around violence against women, catalyzed by the supreme court decision in the rape of a 14-year-old Adivasi (indigenous) girl in police custody. Following that, small, women’s groups began to form in cities all around India focusing on violence against women, which included rape, dowry deaths, female foeticide, and domestic violence. The strategies used by the autonomous women’s movement ranged from changing laws to public consciousness raising via street theater and direct action to providing legal and medical services to women survivors of violence. Thus, the women’s movements both challenged the patriarchal state but also worked with it to establish women’s cells in police stations and women’s commissions at the state and municipal levels to address issues of gender injustice.

CORO drew upon both affiliated and autonomous women’s movements strategies to mobilize and develop poor women as activists and community leaders. While CORO began as a literacy program, they realized that to get women to come to those programs, they needed to address their everyday concerns such as access to public toilets. Most bastis have few toilets which are poorly maintained and pose a particular hazard for women as they are often harassed there. So, in 1992 CORO took over the maintenance of government constructed toilets via a community run program. This focus on toilets and urinals was raised once again by their grassroots fellows in 2011 who decided to focus on the lack of clean, safe, and free urinals for poor women in Mumbai. Unlike privileged women, poor women cannot easily access facilities in restaurants, malls, and other such public spaces to relive themselves.

As CORO’s Grassroots Leadership Development Program aims to work collaboratively with other movements, they built a coalition of thirty-three, primarily women’s movement organizations and NGOs to campaign for the RTP. From the initial focus on free urinals for women, the RTP campaign evolved to a rights-based, gendered mobilization that showed how the lack of access to sanitation violated poor women’s basic rights to equality, dignity, health, and access to the city. This shift in RTP reflects the changing dynamics of women’s movements that have incorporated rights-based language including that of right to the city (e.g., Phadke 2011). This shift in focus was accompanied by strategies that were becoming more common in the women’s movements post liberalization in India as funding and new social media began to shape activism. From participatory research method to mapping and use of hashtag activism the RTP was able to mobilize public and international support for their efforts and put pressure from within and outside on local municipal officials. For example, community members documented the disparity in facilities for women and men, the paucity of and poor conditions of toilets in their communities, at the railway station, and in other public places through which poor women and activists traverse the city on a daily basis. Through such concerted primary research, they were able to provide the city bureaucrats with concrete data and seek accountability as citizens. From initially being a laughing stock in the municipal sanitation department, activists of the RTP campaign have become advocates for equitable and holistic access to sanitation and the city, working with municipal politicians, planners, and policy makers, as well as architects, design firms, and international agencies like UNICEF. By reading the campaign alongside Calvino’s reflections I hope to provide an optimistic palimpsest of contemporary global cities through the activism of one such city’s poor citizens for dignity, recognition, and justice.

As activists from low income communities, the RTP campaign organizers were well versed in how to get the attention of the authorities who otherwise disregard them. For over a year they had failed to get an appointment with the Commissioner for the Sanitation Department of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai known in Marathi as Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to present him with their community led research on mapping the number of toilets, their appalling conditions, and to present their demands which included: separate free, clean, and safe public urinals for women; accessible to women with disabilities; with cleaning supplies and sanitary pads; located every 2 kilometers in each block; clearly marked as free; be maintained by women employees from women’s organizations; funded by BMC; and from initial experimental basis to become part of city planning (Sonar 2017).

Despite their repeated in-person attempts to meet with the Commissioner, they were prevented from doing so by the various levels of bureaucratic gatekeepers who instead made lewd propositions and invited the activists to meet with them instead. The activists took up the bureaucrats’ invitation and met with them in teams, never alone given their lewdness, and not only educated them about the conditions of sanitation in their communities but also gained a lot of information from them about how the department works and the various functionaries in charge of sanitation infrastructure, and the actual allocation and lack of expenditure on sanitation facilities. Thus, they turned an obstacle into opportunity. They did, however, want to meet with the Commissioner.

So after nearly sixteen months of conversing with the lower level bureaucrats, the activists sent a message to the Commissioner, in writing and on social media, that if he did not meet with them, the women from the community would pee in front of the legislative building. This prompted a quick response from the Commissioner who not only met with them but also agreed to appoint an inquiry and to work with them. As expected the inquiry went through a series of stops and starts with very little progress. So the activists sought more innovative communication strategies.

Inspired by two upcoming local festivals the activists got to work. The first festival, Raksha Bandhan (literally protection ties) comes at the end of the monsoon and involves a sister tying a rakhi, a bracelet made of coiled cotton threads with a medallion in the center, to a brother for his safety and protection, who in turn promises to ensure the welfare of the sister. By some accounts the origins of this festival are martial, sisters wishing for the safe returns of their brothers from war. These days the holiday, like every other, is commodified. The activists made scores of rakhis with the RTP slogan on them and mailed them out to local politicians and bureaucrats in BMC.

Mumtaz Sheikh and Supriya Sonar the two activists who have become the public face of the campaign, even showed up to tie a rakhi to the commissioner. Such actions got the attention of the media. The Marathi language print media were particularly supportive and consistently covered the campaign over the years. The English language print media in Mumbai also covered it and the campaign was even covered in the New York Times in 2012 (Yardley 2012). Mumtaz Sheikh was recognized by the BBC as one of the 100 most influential women in 2015. Such attention did not always translate into results. Further words and actions were necessary before the city responded anemically at best.

Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, which marks the victory of the divine king Rama over the evil king Ravana, occurs during late October/early November. During this time family and friends exchange cards and sweets. The RTP campaign, designed a series of Diwali greeting cards with images of the conditions of the toilets in the communities and messages that reflected their frustrations with the lack of action from the BMC.

Some of the messages included:

Duragandhyukt, asvach, asurkshit shauchalya apaki diwali shubh kare (may smelly, unclean, unprotected toilets enhance your Diwali).

Bharat mein shauchalayo ki is avashtha ko dekhakate hue bhi aap aap ki diwalishubh aur ushah se bhari manayenge yahi apeksha hai. Diwali ki hardik shubhkamnaye” (Even after looking at the state of toilets in the country, we are sure that you will celebrate the festival of Diwali with the same enthusiasm. With best wishes for a happy Diwali).

This tactic led not only to an interview but also the appointment of 23 junior overseers, 17 of whom were women, for monitoring the conditions of toilets in their communities. Additionally, the commissioner formed a 10-member committee, 5 from RTP and 5 from the state’s women’s commission, to review sanitation conditions in the 24 wards of the city and propose a plan. BMC also launched a helpline-1996- to register complaints. Each ward in the city was to launch free urinals for women and the RTP activists participated in developing guidelines for pay and use toilets as well. In the past, fees collected from such toilets were rarely used for the upkeep of the facilities. With vigilance from the community and monitoring and reporting by the BMC things have begun to be implemented.

Another campaign that drew attention and raised awareness in the larger community and among city officials was highlighting places in their communities where men routinely relieve themselves despite free urinals, which women do not have. For three days, thirty women from CORO and their affiliated Mahila Mandals, women’s collectives, painted spots where men frequently urinate in public with the following slogan: Moklewha pan yogyathikani (relieve yourselves but at the right places). By targeting men in the community, they also sought their cooperation by showing the unfair advantage they had in being able to relieve themselves either in free urinals or where ever and whenever they needed unlike women who had to either pay or wait until they found a safe place.

Their relentless and collaborative efforts were recognized by the Chief Minister (CM) of Maharashtra who gave the team the Savitri Sanman (a recognition named after the well-known 19^th century scholar activist Savitribai Phule) in 2016. They accepted the award only on the condition that the CM would make a public commitment to ensuring free urinals for women in the low-income communities, at railway stations and throughout the state. The CM not only accepted those conditions but also met with them the next day and invited them to participate in a state level committee on sanitation to provide a gendered perspective. The acceptance of this award was contrary to their return of the award that the Mayor of Mumbai had given the campaign on March 8^th, International Women’s Day, in recognition of their work. They returned the award to demonstrate their frustration at the lack of progress despite commitments from various city officials.

Following the recognition by the Chief Minister of the state, the RTP activists were also successful in including issues of urinals and toilets as part of women’s right to sanitation in the 20-year development plan of the city. Their work also received some momentum from the Swatch Bharat or Clean India campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 to address the issue of open defecation in India. With sanitation coverage barely reaching 50% of urban residents and only 31% of rural residents, the issue is an embarrassment to India’s aspirations to be a global player. As Konoon (2017) notes, however, this campaign for the most part is a continuation of old sanitation policies under a new slogan by the media savvy PM who is catering to the growing new middle classes. As Doron and Raja (2015) note, however, such campaigns by the state and donors focus on technological or “hardware” fixes and fail to address the structural inequalities that underlie the issue in the first place.

To share their successes the RTP campaign held a national convention in 2016 in which a variety of stakeholders from the state, municipal corporations, and women’s movements from six states participated. Here the emphasis was to present and discuss not just the issue of safe, clean, and free toilets but a gendered perspective on sanitation as a whole and women’s right to a safe city. A decade later, the RTP movement continues to raise awareness, advocate on their own behalf, make the city accountable, and also continues their research and work with city planners, architects, and international agencies.

Their influence on providing a subaltern view of gender and the city has been substantial. Many of the women’s groups who are part of the campaign have been working on issues of poor women’s right to work and access the city without harassment for decades so this is not surprising. Together, the RTP and women’s organizations in the city have begun to influence policy through including a gender budget in planning along with specific line items for urinals and toilets. Additionally, the state’s women’s policy now also has a chapter on sanitation. They have also worked with design firms to plan gender friendly toilets, including for women with disability and trans women. A current project involves comparative mapping of toilet facilities in the “most advanced” A ward of the city with the “least developed” M ward-East where RTP is based with the help of UNICEF, the Urban Project, and BMC (Lingam 2019). As Lingam (2019, p. 11) notes: “By campaigning for the gender practical need of basic sanitation, they have achieved gender strategic significance by connecting their movement to people’s rights to dignity, mobility and citizenship.” They have also demonstrated the power of subaltern women as knowledge producers to conduct research and influence policy.

But challenges remain. As Calvino noted: “Marozia consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallow’s; both change with time, but their relationship does not change; the second is the one about to free itself from the first.” Collaborations are difficult to sustain, governments at all levels renege on their commitments, the media and the public’s attention is diverted by other issues and mobilizations. Yet, RTP endures and here Calvino’s take on Berenice might be instructive.

Yet, I think the RTP campaign offers us more and takes us to other reflections from Calvino.

In an otherwise insightful article on the “politics of shit,” Doron and Raja (2015) rightfully note that one has to question the assumptions and the framing of the problem of open defecation in urban India. Particularly,

…. the fact that it is identified as a ‘problem’ requiring particular kinds of mostly technological solutions. As such it tends to gloss over the structural inequalities and cultural forms that shape social practices and people’s experiences of the public domain. Perhaps we need to reconceptualize the realm of public space from that perspective, for it seems that neither modernist categories, Hindu culture (caste) nor universal human rights perspectives can account for how the poor and migrant communities experience the cities, because their values, aspirations and needs constitute a frame of reference that is important in its own right

While I agree with them that glossing over structural inequalities and framing the issue as one of lack of modern values among the subaltern is problematic, and that we should consider the values, aspirations, and needs of the poor and migrant in their own rights, I do not agree that those aspirations and values are completely oppositional to human rights and modern conceptions of justice. As we saw with the RTP campaign, the activists sought to frame their struggles in the language of rights and gender discrimination. And while the campaign paid attention to women with disability and transwomen, they did not do so explicitly to issues of caste. Hence, the poor and migrant do not inhabit a completely alternative public space with a wholly different set of aspirations and values, even as their lived realities might reflect the inferno that Marco Polo describes in Invisible Cities. But Polo describes two ways to live in the infernos that are our global cities have become for the majority of their inhabitants.

The RTP campaign, I’d like to suggest is choosing the riskier path but in so doing providing hopes for a future of the swallows.