New Delhi, August 27 It started with an observation. A 20-year-old student of the Lady Sri Ram College, “admittedly not very expressive about women’s issues”, saw a frail old woman cleaning a public toilet on Yusuf Sarai Road through her bus window.
“The toilet was full of filthy, mud-coloured water. A man was relieving himself just outside the toilet. And there was this frail woman with a jharoo, desperately trying to clean it,” Shahana Sheikh, a final year BA Economics (Hons) student, wrote. What bothered the quiet, bespectacled student was the fact that the woman who cleaned the toilet could not use it.
“She cannot use this toilet. Where does she go when she wants to relieve herself? She represented the poorest of the poor, who can hardly afford such facilities,” Sheikh wrote in her 94-page summer report, during her internship at the Centre for Civil Society, a research organisation here.
Sanitation Updates 