Reimagining Sanitation as a Rights-Based Approach: When Toilets Become Dignity

By Navumeed Foundation • The Peoples Feed • August 2025

In India’s bustling villages and crowded cities, sanitation is more than an engineering challenge—it’s a matter of justice. A toilet can mean the difference between exclusion and inclusion, illness and health, indignity and dignity. This story explores how reimagining sanitation as a rights-based approach can transform lives across India.

Why Sanitation as a Right Matters Today

Sanitation is not just about concrete structures—it is about dignity, equity, and survival. In 2010, the United Nations recognized the rights to water and sanitation as fundamental human rights, derived from the right to an adequate standard of living. In India, the story remains uneven: preventable diseases still strain families and clinics, girls lose days of school each month for lack of safe facilities, and sanitation workers risk their lives in hazardous conditions. Treating sanitation as a right—rather than charity—shifts responsibility from “beneficiaries” to rights-holders and from good intentions to duty-bearer accountability ^[1].

• Health: Poor sanitation contributes to diarrhoeal disease and undernutrition; child stunting remains a persistent challenge ^[2].
• Education: Inadequate school WASH facilities especially impact adolescent girls’ attendance and retention ^[2].
• Dignity & Safety: Women and the elderly face harassment and risk when forced to defecate in the open.
• Labour Justice: Manual scavenging—prohibited by law—still endangers lives and entrenches caste-based exclusion ^[3].

“A toilet is not a gift. It is a right that protects our dignity.” – Community health worker, Bundelkhand

Ground-Level Successes

Right to Pee, Mumbai

In 2011, a coalition of women’s groups reframed public urinals as a women’s rights issue. Their campaign highlighted the inequity of thousands of free urinals for men, while women had to pay—or go without. The movement spurred municipal commitments for women-friendly toilets with lighting, water, and hygiene amenities, demonstrating how rights framing can shift budgets and design standards ^[4].

Ending Manual Scavenging, Tamil Nadu

Dalit-led movements and public-interest litigation pushed the state to acknowledge deaths inside sewers and septic tanks and to compensate families, while accelerating mechanization and rehabilitation schemes. The judiciary anchored these steps in dignity and the right to life, reinforcing that sanitation labour must be safe, mechanized, and free from caste bondage ^[5].

School Sanitation, Bihar

Community-driven upgrades—separate girls’ toilets, water access, disposal for menstrual waste, and privacy—led to measurable gains in attendance and retention for adolescent girls. The takeaway: design for dignity is as important as the number of toilets built ^[6].

Global Precedent: South Africa

South Africa’s courts recognized that water and sanitation are inseparable from dignity and equality, compelling municipalities to deliver inclusive services. The lesson for India is clear: legal enforceability strengthens budgets, planning, and delivery ^[7].

Backing the Rights Revolution: Policy & Innovation

India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) catalyzed a historic expansion in household toilets and open-defecation-free declarations. The next frontier is use, maintenance, and equity: ensuring water availability, safe containment, desludging services, and disability-inclusive design. A rights lens hardwires accountability into every stage—planning, construction, O&M, and grievance redressal ^[8].

• Legal duties: The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act (2013) outlaws hazardous cleaning and mandates rehabilitation—requiring budgets, mechanization, and monitoring ^[3].
• Gender lens: Norms for safe lighting, locks, menstrual hygiene management, and caregiver-friendly cubicles.
• Service chain focus: From toilet to treatment—safe containment, desludging, transport, and fecal sludge treatment plants.
• Community accountability: Ward-level sanitation audits, citizen report cards, and social contracts with service providers.

Not All Toilets Are Equal

• Water scarcity: Toilets without reliable water remain unused.
• Cultural resistance: Habits and norms can outlast infrastructure unless communities co-design solutions.
• Maintenance gaps: Broken doors, poor lighting, and unclean facilities undermine trust.
• Caste & labour risks: Sewer cleaning must be fully mechanized; no human should enter a tank.
• Data blind spots: Counting toilets is not the same as counting safe, dignified use.

Scaling with Equity

1. Codify the right: Explicitly recognize sanitation as a justiciable right in state policies and municipal bylaws, with enforceable service standards.
2. Finance the full chain: Earmark budgets for water connections, O&M, desludging vehicles, and fecal sludge treatment—not just construction.
3. Design for inclusion: Universal design for disability, elderly, transgender persons; gender-segregated, child-safe facilities; rural and urban slum adaptations.
4. End manual scavenging: Citywide mechanization, skill transitions, compensation, and dignified alternative livelihoods.
5. Measure what matters: Use, cleanliness, safety, privacy, downtime, and grievance resolution times as core KPIs.

A Day with Savita: From Fear to Freedom

In Bundelkhand, sixteen-year-old Savita rationed evening water to avoid stepping into darkness for open defecation. Her family had a toilet built under SBM, but no water line and a broken latch turned it into a locked symbol of promises unmet. When her village formed a sanitation committee, women mapped unsafe paths, demanded a tap connection, and replaced broken hardware. They negotiated desludging with the Panchayat and set a cleaning roster. The toilet stopped being a structure. It became safety, privacy, and time reclaimed—and Savita returned to evening studies.

Her story is not unique; it is a blueprint. When sanitation is claimed as a right, communities design, monitor, and defend it. Governments respond with budgets and standards. Markets supply better products and services. Dignity, once deferred, becomes daily life.

Conclusion

India’s toilet revolution was historic. The next step must be transformative. Reimagining sanitation as a rights-based system moves us from counting toilets to guaranteeing safe, dignified use for all. If every citizen can claim sanitation as an entitlement—and every authority is held accountable—India will not just build toilets; it will build dignity.

References & Further Reading

1. United Nations — Human Right to Water & Sanitation (2010). ↩
2. NFHS-5 — National Family Health Survey (Key Indicators). ↩ ↩
3. Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act, 2013. ↩ ↩
4. Times of India — “Right to Pee” Campaign Coverage. ↩
5. The Hindu — Tamil Nadu Manual Scavenging Court Directions (2023). ↩
6. WaterAid India — School Sanitation & MHM Studies. ↩
7. South Africa Constitutional Court — Socio-Economic Rights Jurisprudence. ↩
8. Swachh Bharat Mission — Guidelines & Progress. ↩