“Changing a bus mid-route shouldn’t have turned into a lesson on India’s sanitation crisis, but it did.”
It was supposed to be a short stopover. Swarna Saxena, a social changemaker, was halfway to her hometown when biology demanded a pause. During a 15-minute bus change in a Tier-2 city, she went looking for a toilet, something so basic that in 2025 should not be difficult to find.
To her surprise, it was very difficult to find it.
She first asked at the travel counter.
“No facility here, madam,” came the reply. “Try the guesthouse.”
The guesthouse had an empty reception and locked washrooms.
Back at the counter, someone suggested, “Paas mein ek toilet hai… aap wah ja sakti ho (There’s a toilet nearby… you can go there).”
When Saxena went there, she discovered it was an open urinal.
“Sab yahi use karte hain,” she was told. Even the watchman added, “Ladkiyan bhi yahi use karti hain (Even the girls use this one).”
She refused and kept searching until a shopgirl pointed her upstairs to a “ladies’ washroom.” It was dimly lit and poorly maintained, but at least it was separate.
“That day, I didn’t feel unsafe because of people,” Saxena later wrote on LinkedIn. “I felt unsafe because of the situation we’ve collectively allowed to exist.”
In 2025, finding a clean, functional public toilet in India remains a gamble, not just in villages or Tier-3 towns, but even in bus stands, railway stations, markets, and metro cities. Some of the major problems are as follows:
They don’t exist:
Thousands of public spaces still lack basic sanitation. Women, children, the elderly, and the differently-abled suffer the most.
They exist but are unusable:
Locked doors, unclean seats, dry taps, or poorly lit stalls make them unsafe or unusable.
They exist but are misused:
Men walk into women’s sections. Toilets double as storage rooms. Taps are stolen. Doors are broken.
The global picture isn’t much better. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2024):
57% of the global population (4.6 billion people) used a safely managed sanitation service.
Over 1.5 billion people still do not have basic sanitation services, such as private toilets or latrines.
Of these, 419 million still defecate in the open, in gutters, behind bushes, or into open bodies of water.
India’s Swachh Bharat Mission built over 10 crore household toilets, a monumental milestone. Yet public sanitation remains an afterthought. The result is that women skip meals before travel, girls miss school during menstruation, drivers relieve themselves in the open, and dignity remains negotiable.
India's Swachh Bharat Mission is a nationwide campaign launched on October 2, 2014, to eliminate open defecation and improve sanitation and cleanliness across the country.
The real question is why, even in 2025, we continue to tolerate such conditions. Cleanliness and sanitation, which should be among the most basic fundamental rights, remain distant from people’s everyday reality.
Step into almost any public urinal in India, from Delhi to Bhopal to Guwahati, and you will likely face one of the following things:
A choking stench from clogged drains
Broken or missing doors
No water, soap, or light
Paan-stained walls and flooded floors
These are not exceptions anymore, they’ve become the norm. The real tragedy is that we’ve normalized it. We’ve been tolerating such conditions for so long that they’ve become a new normal. Holding in your pee until you reach home is something many women have sadly accepted as routine.
The government builds, but we destroy. Somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten our basic civic sense that what it means to respect public spaces and practice sanitation responsibly.
Citizens don’t flush.
Shopkeepers dump waste.
Authorities fail to maintain.
Contracts are awarded but rarely monitored.
“Sulabh Shauchalaya” boards hang proudly, while the toilet is padlocked or flooded.
This is not just mismanagement. It is collective apathy, a silent agreement that public means nobody’s responsibility.
And for this women pay the highest price.
Holding urine for hours leads to UTIs and kidney issues
Using unsafe spaces increases the risk of harassment or assault
According to a study published in PubMed,"Holding urine for long time had proven to be an important risk factor and amongst different reasons of holding urine, holding due to poor sanitary condition of public toilets was the most common."
Poor sanitation is linked to diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid, as well as intestinal worms, polio, stunting, and antimicrobial resistance, as per WHO.
As Saxena asked:
“Why do women have to feel helpless for something as basic as peeing?”
She isn’t wrong. Access to clean and safe sanitation isn’t a privilege, it’s a fundamental right. Yet, in 2025, countless women still plan their day around when and where they can relieve themselves. Why should anyone have to wait until they reach home for something so basic?
Swarna Saxena’s story is not just an anecdote. It is a mirror.
Change begins with accountability:
Flush. Wash. Leave it clean.
Teach children the same respect for public spaces.
Report negligence to civic bodies.
Empower women’s safety and dignity through design and policy.
Until every citizen treats sanitation as a shared responsibility, development remains incomplete.
Reference:
1. Jagtap S, Harikumar S, Vinayagamoorthy V, Mukhopadhyay S, Dongre A. Comprehensive assessment of holding urine as a behavioral risk factor for UTI in women and reasons for delayed voiding. BMC Infect Dis. 2022 Jun 6;22(1):521. doi: 10.1186/s12879-022-07501-4. PMID: 35668379; PMCID: PMC9172065.
Edited by M Subha Maheswari
