Sanitation citizenship: state expectations and community practices of shared toilet use and maintenance in urban India

Abstract

Although India declared itself “open defecation free” in 2019, critics charge that its national urban sanitation campaign, Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban (SBM-U), has failed. SBM-U provided community toilets in informal settlements where household latrines were unviable, delegating their upkeep to local governments and users. Initially, these community toilets were used. However, the failure to maintain and repair them resulted in a reversion to open defecation, forcing the state to reconsider its decision to withdraw after construction. We use the SBM-U to develop a framework of “sanitation citizenship”, which emerges through sanitation infrastructure’s use and disuse, and emerges over its life course. We trace how mutual expectations and everyday practices of citizenship by the state and users aligned and fractured during the construction, maintenance and repair phases of community toilets. We argue that the changing material condition of infrastructure is critical to negotiations over mutual obligations and definitions of the citizenship contract.

I. Introduction

During fieldwork in two bastis (slums)⁽¹⁾ of Jaipur, India, government-built community toilets were crumbling, locked and/or full of dirt and debris. They were clearly not in use; taps, squat toilet pans and other fixtures had been taken. If the toilets had ever been in working order, they had not been maintained. In a third basti, the sole community toilet (CT), built in the Dalit⁽²⁾ neighbourhood by a foreign donor, was declared unusable by almost all local women. “We had intended to use the public toilet, but two days after it is cleaned, it is too dirty to be used”, a woman and her daughter told us. There was no water for flushing, so faeces were present in all stalls (10 for men, 10 for women), and there were no waste containers, so sanitary pads were piled up in the women’s stalls. The CT drained directly into an open canal. A fourth basti had a public toilet that was kept clean by a caretaker and had lighting and water. Few families used it, as most households had individual household latrines (IHHLs), but when the caretaker was there to open it, households without IHHLs used it. People were willing to pay for its use, particularly women who wanted the convenience and safety compared to open defecation (OD). In all four communities, then, most respondents with access to CTs returned to OD, due to irregular opening times, the absence of functioning toilets or conditions they deemed filthy or unsafe.

OD has been a stubborn thorn in India’s side. Although the Modi government (2014–) declared India “open defecation free” (ODF) in 2019,⁽³⁾ critics charge that its national urban sanitation campaign, Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban (SBM-U), has failed: not all low-income communities have access to sanitation. These communities and their advocates claim that the campaign has not provided toilets for all, toilets they want to use, or the means to keep them functioning. The Government of India (GOI) counters that the SBM-U has provided access to IHHLs or CTs for urban low-income communities, but that responsibilities for cleaning and maintenance lie with municipal governments, public–private partnerships and users.⁽⁴⁾ The two sides agree that CTs are not maintained and repaired, but each side points the finger at the other for this failure. Meanwhile, the decades-old problem of OD, and its associated health and social problems, continues.

Following India’s 2008 National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP), which sought to transform urban India into “community-driven, totally sanitized, healthy and liveable cities and towns”,⁽⁵⁾ the SBM-U campaign was launched in 2014 with an explicit goal to provide improved sanitation to all urban residents to end OD, and to eradicate all unimproved toilets.⁽⁶⁾ In line with the NUSP, the SBM-U addressed land tenure insecurity as a primary constraint on sanitation construction, and decoupled legal status from service provision.⁽⁷⁾ The NUSP directed local governments to decide whether sanitation to low-income residents should be individual (e.g. IHHLs) or communal (i.e. CTs), but that IHHLs should be prioritized. Accordingly, the SBM-U planned for incentives (formerly subsidies) to 80 per cent of households in informal settlements to build IHHLs and assumed the remaining 20 per cent would be covered by CTs. India’s policies for urban sanitation provision defined the state’s responsibilities clearly: it would provide access to safe sanitation to all citizens, wherever (and thus, whoever) they might be; in return, it expected citizens to use and assist in the maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. For the GOI, citizenship meant active participation in creating a clean urban India.

The case of the SBM-U illustrates the all-too-familiar pattern of development interventions, whereby infrastructure is built by the state but not subsequently maintained by either local authorities or users, so the advantage of the infrastructure is not realised.⁽⁸⁾ Discourses of failed community ownership, lack of capacity-building and/or insufficient behaviour change are deployed, often blaming communities for allowing infrastructure to fall into disrepair and disuse, leaving basic needs once again unmet.⁽⁹⁾ Such narratives identify the construction of CTs as a success for central government (i.e. the state), while municipal corporations have failed in their responsibilities of maintenance (from caretaking to organizing contracts for caretaking)⁽¹⁰⁾ and communities have failed to use and/or maintain CTs.⁽¹¹⁾

In these development narratives, it is assumed that infrastructure construction does not alter the nature of the relationship between the state and the poor. The state and low-income citizens interact through infrastructure, but are presumed to emerge from this interaction with aligned mutual expectations and appropriate practices and identities.⁽¹²⁾ However, the examples above show that the changing material conditions of sanitation infrastructure leveraged changes in state–citizen relations over time. They illustrate how the stance of each party changed as CTs remained incomplete, were unmaintained after construction or were not always open.

In SBM-U policy, the state framed low-income communities as beneficiaries of government largesse, casting them as eager to contribute to state goals through participation in infrastructure planning and behaviour change (i.e. compliance). Informal settlers appreciated state recognition of their needs and demands, but became disillusioned when construction was shoddy, incomplete or unrealised.⁽¹³⁾ After construction, the state–citizen relationship shifted yet again with the need for upkeep. Shared sanitation infrastructure needs daily cleaning and regular repair. If such upkeep is absent, then users abandon toilets and revert to OD. As sanitation infrastructure became dilapidated, people’s refusal to use dirty or non-functioning toilets forced the state, in order to curb OD, to continue its engagement through maintenance and repair, despite its plans to withdraw after construction.⁽¹⁴⁾ This reflects a key “blind spot” in Indian sanitation policy, whereby the government – and to some extent slum dwellers and their advocates – assumed that sanitation deficiencies could be addressed through hardware, albeit provided in a participatory fashion and with behaviour-change messaging. The state’s neglect of maintenance, on the assumption that this could be delegated, allowed it to delimit its responsibility to infrastructure construction, rather than sustainability, even if this arguably led to the all-too-familiar failures highlighted above.

Our aim in this article is to use the design, implementation and contestation of India’s SBM-U campaign to develop a framework that we call “sanitation citizenship”, which emerges through sanitation infrastructure’s use and disuse, and emerges over its life course. Simply put, we trace how the state and informal settlers interacted through their engagement with the changing material condition of infrastructure, and how expectations and practices of citizenship aligned and broke down at different moments, particularly in the construction, maintenance and repair phases of CTs. We do this by bringing together the lenses of infrastructural citizenship⁽¹⁵⁾ and the temporal fragility of infrastructure⁽¹⁶⁾ to demonstrate that phases of construction, maintenance and repair run parallel with the creation, negotiation and breakdown of citizenship contracts. Drawing on the concept of infrastructural citizenship, we contend that sanitation infrastructure led to an alteration of the state–citizenship relationship, which emerged due to construction of shared sanitation and was unanticipated by the Indian state. Through the lens of temporal fragility, we reveal how sanitation infrastructure’s changing material condition as it was maintained (or not) drove the state’s and citizens’ expectations of each other.⁽¹⁷⁾

Following this introduction, section II reviews critical infrastructure studies to ground our conceptual framing of sanitation citizenship. Section III applies this framing to secondary data on the unfolding and contestation of urban sanitation in India, particularly through the SBM-U. Section IV then analyses how this shaped the dynamics of urban sanitation and citizenship. In section V, we conclude by arguing that shared sanitation reveals how citizenship relations change over the life course of infrastructure, and call for sharper attention to maintenance and repair. Given the risks associated with OD, the concept of sanitation citizenship offers a new way to understand the complexity of urban sanitation uptake.

II. Urban Infrastructure and the Remaking of Citizenship

Recent debates in urban studies have argued that “infrastructure” is embedded in sociopolitical processes that determine its form, uptake and lived experiences. Infrastructure, as the symbol of “rights to the city”, is the focal point for scholars seeking to unearth moments and materials that shape the opportunity and ability of low-income residents to assert those rights.⁽¹⁸⁾ Yet, this literature has tended to focus on infrastructure as a singular construction that does not necessarily change over time, leading in empirical analyses to a privileging of singular events – such as construction, demolition and replacement. Ramakrishnan et al.⁽¹⁹⁾ argue that it is necessary to go farther and include the temporality of infrastructure in these accounts. Their approach emphasizes infrastructure’s material (or physical) nature over its life course, i.e. how the fluctuating materiality of infrastructure shapes its attendant social relations. Through the concept of temporal fragility, Ramakrishnan et al.⁽²⁰⁾ bring together the dimensions of embodied labour, political relations and socio-natures that have been explored by infrastructure scholars as separate. An infrastructure’s material condition at any moment in time indexes what is politically possible and signals social inclusion or exclusion, for instance, through creating shifts in social cooperation and contestation, political engagement and withdrawal, and access to and control of natural resources.⁽²¹⁾ Infrastructure’s material form and condition thus always shape, and are shaped by, social processes and power relations. They are always in the making, opening opportunities for social change.⁽²²⁾

Within the non-linear processes of decay, maintenance and repair, the material nature of infrastructure at these moments influences human experiences, from disappointment with infrastructure allowed to decay before completion, to despair at the social exclusion that accompanies infrastructure in need of repair. Physical labour, too, is mobilized to address infrastructure that must be worked on to remain functional – as Ramakrishnan et al. say, “the value of repair and maintenance cannot be overstated”.⁽²³⁾ Labour – usually along class, caste, race or gender lines – keeps infrastructure functioning.⁽²⁴⁾ Labour or its absence can also act as a political statement, particularly when communities that do the critical work of maintenance and repair move out of the social shadows and into plain sight, reminding the public of their necessity. For example, demonstrations by waste workers in Dakar brought the public’s attention to deteriorating labour conditions, decaying infrastructure and the value of their labour.⁽²⁵⁾ Furthermore, the materiality of infrastructure can demarcate disjunctures between the state and citizens’ expectations, as in the case of Vietnam,⁽²⁶⁾ where housing allowed to decay by the state elicited selective repair by residents so that they could remain. Their actions, whether to repair or to leave, gave a material indication of what they were and were not willing to accept from the state regarding services and infrastructure. Maintenance and repair work and those who do it may be off-stage or centre-stage, yet both the actors and their actions are critical to the functioning of infrastructure and instrumental in reshaping state–citizen relationships.

The making of infrastructure also gives rise to differentiated citizenship and uneven socio-natural relationships. This is illustrated by Spronk’s⁽²⁷⁾ examination of low-cost water supply and sewerage for low-income residents in El Alto, Bolivia. Those already on the social margins did far more than other urban residents to secure water and sanitation: they laboured collectively to connect their homes to the network and were responsible for maintaining pipes that ran under their yards. Yet the poor quality and constantly breaking systems served to reinforce the social stigma of uncleanliness and poverty among this Indigenous population. Similarly, the everyday labour of accessing fragmented water and sanitation infrastructure by homeless people in Turin, Italy and informal settlement dwellers in Mumbai, India wove these populations into an intricate web of mutual support, state services, private corporations and NGOs that made urban life possible.⁽²⁸⁾ In the global South, where modern imaginaries of flush toilets for all urban residents are impracticable, public health goals can be reached through on-site sanitation and off-site treatment infrastructure, provided that the state engages citizens more as subjects knowledgeable about sanitation infrastructure construction and maintenance and less as objects to be educated and controlled.⁽²⁹⁾ These examples illustrate how policies and practices of decay, maintenance and repair may be mobilized by the state, international donors, private companies, developers and citizens in the negotiation of citizenship claims.

Lemanski’s⁽³⁰⁾ recent concept of “infrastructural citizenship” brings into focus the actions performed and the expectations associated with infrastructure that signal the state–citizen relationship. As she sees it, the state’s primary relationship to the public is through the medium of infrastructure.⁽³¹⁾ On the one hand, the state uses infrastructure to demonstrate that it is meeting public needs: constructing it, privatizing it, maintaining it, demolishing it, are all ways in which the state relates to citizens. The state also uses infrastructure to produce compliant citizens, i.e. infrastructure becomes a means of social control and order, for example through the restrictions placed on social housing.⁽³²⁾ On the other hand, public infrastructure also renders the state highly visible to citizens, making it an important target for their interpretations of citizenship through actions and expectations.⁽³³⁾ Citizens make demands on the state for infrastructure, and subsequently view state-provided infrastructure, built in their name, as the pathway through which to exercise their rights and claim legitimacy as citizens. As Lemanski states,⁽³⁴⁾ the “provision and maintenance of infrastructure is intrinsically connected to citizenship identities and practices through activities and expectations”. She makes an important distinction between rights as a one-off event, and citizenship, which denotes an ongoing relationship that is “always in the making”.⁽³⁵⁾

Lemanski’s framing of infrastructural citizenship therefore implies that infrastructure does not only entail the fulfilment of basic needs but becomes a means of reworking the state–citizen contract in both directions. As she also points out, an immediate disjuncture in this contract occurs when the state sees the provision of infrastructure as the fulfilment of its contract with citizens, while citizens do not, especially when it does not meet their physical or cultural needs.⁽³⁶⁾ For example, she notes how citizens may adapt public infrastructure by building informal extensions onto social housing units to better accommodate large extended families, but by doing so they disrupt the uniform aesthetics of new settlements and challenge the citizenship expectations of the state.⁽³⁷⁾ This illustrates Lemanski’s assertion that citizens are closely connected to the state through infrastructure as much as, or even more than, they are through political processes. This close connection, Benjamin⁽³⁸⁾ argues in the case of urban India, happens primarily because the urban poor tend to be intimately bound to local politicians and municipal governments through vote bank politics, but collectively have little ability to influence decisions taken at state or national levels regarding urban infrastructure, despite claims that such infrastructure will drive citywide economic development.⁽³⁹⁾ When the urban poor are supported by (only) local organizations, the focus remains on grassroots solutions and people’s participation rather than on wider, deeply political, planning processes.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Instead of ongoing public debate about the provision of infrastructure and services to city residents (see Jaglin⁽⁴¹⁾ on differentiated service provision of urban sanitation services), low-income residents are invited to “participate” only after decisions have been taken at higher levels of government. That is not the end of the story, however, because the provision, adaptation and shifting materiality of infrastructure offer ways for the state and citizens to renegotiate the citizenship contract.

Lemanski’s conceptualization of infrastructural citizenship is analytically powerful, but it is primarily predicated upon the provision of infrastructure, and to some extent its subsequent adaptation to better meet users’ needs.⁽⁴²⁾ It leaves under-addressed the material condition of infrastructure (e.g. crumbling bricks and mortar), and the issues of maintenance and repair highlighted by Ramakrishnan et al., which we have contended are so important to sanitation infrastructure. Thus, we seek to bring infrastructure’s materiality into sharper focus, in order to consider infrastructure as an ongoing, material process – that is, to pay greater attention to the changing (material) nature and condition of infrastructure that precipitates particular practices of citizens and the state, including disjointed expectations of each for the other. Building on both these frameworks – the temporal fragility of infrastructure and infrastructural citizenship – directs attention to the repatterning of infrastructural citizenship through the dynamic material condition of infrastructure as it becomes in need of and undergoes maintenance and repair.

We contend that the case of CTs in India demonstrates how these frameworks can complement each other. First, CTs are built by the state in response to citizen demand, but, because they are shared, they do not wholly fulfil that demand (given the strong preference for IHHLs). Second, CTs are a form of common property infrastructure shared by a community but with unclear ownership arrangements, which complicates maintenance responsibilities. Third, beyond their construction, CTs require intensive upkeep, needing at least daily maintenance (deep cleaning, waste disposal, pipe unblocking, sewage emptying), and regular repair (e.g. of cracked pans/plates, water leaks, stall door locks and lighting) to be usable.⁽⁴³⁾ Fourth, CTs are confined to low-income populations, especially in informal settlements where it is unviable to install household toilets. While policy emphasizes the importance of access to sanitation infrastructure for dignity,⁽⁴⁴⁾ it also perpetuates a faulty development narrative that “any toilet is better than none”. This is refuted by experimental⁽⁴⁵⁾ and ethnographic⁽⁴⁶⁾ studies that detail how unclean, broken toilets are avoided, and can become targets for anti-social behaviour (e.g. men’s drinking). Fifth, as acknowledged by Lemanski, CTs can be interpreted as a means of social control as well as a public health intervention, as they are arguably aimed more at curbing OD than at preventing diarrhoeal disease per se. Thus, an examination of sanitation through the lens of sanitation citizenship makes clear that the material condition and constant maintenance needs of CTs shape the relationship between the state and those expected to use them.

Our proposed framing of sanitation citizenship indicates that the provision of sanitation and the curtailment of OD should be addressed as questions of how state–citizen relations are reworked over the wider temporal spectrum of the life phases of infrastructure. In the specific case of sanitation, both construction and maintenance create and mediate the state–citizen contract, highlighting the state’s desire to build and withdraw, but also its forced management of necessary, ongoing maintenance of CTs that requires a high level of bureaucratic capacity and organization, as well as significant and continuing investment. An examination that places CT infrastructure at the centre of state–citizen relations (ongoing), rather than rights (time-limited) – as well as judgements regarding the success or failure of sanitation infrastructure interventions – reveals how citizenship relations are further challenged and sustained by expectations of, and capacities for, maintenance.

III. Actions and Expectations: The Critical Role of Maintenance and Repair

In this section, we examine how the SBM-U in India drove new expectations, actions and responsibilities of citizenship through sanitation provision and the arrangements envisaged for its maintenance. We observe how the Indian government sought to end OD through toilet building on a massive, national scale for unserved communities, envisaged as a one-off action – a fulfilment of citizens’ rights – after which it would no longer be responsible for the infrastructure. We show how slum dwellers’ use of CTs changed as upkeep challenges increased with time, leading to the responsibility for cleaning and maintenance becoming the key point of contestation in the state–citizen relationship.

We draw on O’Reilly’s field research on OD and CT usage in northern Indian informal settlements prior to the SBM-U; newspaper reports prior to, during and post SBM-U; and three detailed urban CT studies conducted by the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Programme (TNUSSP).⁽⁴⁷⁾ The TNUSSP studies were Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded assessments of southern Indian cities’ water, sanitation and wastewater arrangements late in the SBM-U intervention (i.e. 2018). O’Reilly worked with the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (TNUSSP’s lead organization) on a subsequent assessment of the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation initiative in one of the study cities. The studies by TNUSSP are the only detailed assessments of CTs and public toilets (PTs) in the state to date. Our final source, funded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation,⁽⁴⁸⁾ is a mixed methods, randomized control trial evaluating relationships between maintenance and usage of CTs and PTs in the post SBM-U period, and is the only one of its kind. These sources have limitations: their study sites and participants are not representative, given both the size and diversity of India’s geography and population, and the small number of detailed assessments post-SBM-U. Nevertheless, peer-reviewed articles, grey literature and investigative journalism support the data presented from our source material.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Constructing sanitation infrastructure has been a development priority for the Indian state for decades, due to the public health hazard and negative public image associated with OD. The NUSP (which preceded and informed the SBM-U) directed that low-income communities be involved in the process of planning and managing sanitation arrangements in their settlements, including assessment of the technical and financial feasibility of IHHLs or the necessity of CTs as an alternative. The physical difficulty of constructing IHHLs for all slum dwellers led to the SBM-U’s CT coverage policy, which assumed that unserved slum populations would welcome access to any toilet – a serious miscalculation. CTs represented a form of infrastructure that did not fully meet local needs nor solve the structural problems that would inhibit their use, as the following quotes illustrate:

“There is a liquor shop nearby, and the [toilet stall] doors couldn’t be locked. Sometimes there is no electricity. Nothing has happened so far, but it is better to take someone with you.” (Woman, Jaipur)⁽⁵⁰⁾

“When I have to use the toilet, I can still consider walking to the CT . . . but when it comes to my kids, they’re so young and have no definite schedule, so it’s not easy for me to take them to the toilet every time.” (Woman, Delhi)⁽⁵¹⁾

“We [the GOI] have . . . sunk funds into toilets that are not functional anymore.” (Sandhya Singh, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation)⁽⁵²⁾

While toilets were primarily envisaged as meeting bodily needs, they also had to address other social concerns to facilitate usage. Usage is important because it is tied to maintenance; heavy use can be challenging for upkeep, but low use can result in insufficient revenue to pay for it (where maintenance is funded wholly or partly through user charges). Beyond inadequate maintenance (our main focus, to which we turn below), other commonly documented issues impeding CT use include: distance, safety, accessibility (e.g. by elderly people and persons with disabilities), queues and fees.⁽⁵³⁾ As the quotes above indicate, the risk of sexual violence for women when going to and/or using the CT was a barrier,⁽⁵⁴⁾ as was distance for mothers with young children, even if, ironically, CTs were expected to ease caregivers’ work. Both of these difficulties were exacerbated by queuing, where the ratio between toilets and users was too low.⁽⁵⁵⁾ User fees were also challenging for low-income users, especially for pay-to-use CTs, and OD was always a free alternative. These concerns highlight not only the importance of facilities that are available, clean and safe, but also the negative feedback cycle that can occur when poor maintenance (in particular, uncleanliness) leads to lower usage and fee collection, further limiting opening hours and cleaning – the condition that Armand et al. call the “poor maintenance trap”.⁽⁵⁶⁾

In addition to expecting that residents of informal settlements would participate in overcoming the infrastructural limitations of available sanitation options, the SBM-U policy made it clear that maintenance and repair of infrastructure would shift to Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), which would then make arrangements with private contractors, civil society organizations or users themselves.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Although ULBs were legally responsible for operation and maintenance of CTs after construction, in practice they typically lacked the institutional capacity and funding streams to fulfil their constitutional duties, leaving CT maintenance unaddressed despite intense need. This meant that users became solely responsible for units, or else opted to go for OD. Decentralization of operation and maintenance, in effect, singled out low-income residents as compared with middle- and upper-class urbanites, who were not expected to plan, manage or maintain their sanitation facilities (see Chaplin⁽⁵⁸⁾ on India’s postcolonial, class politics of sanitation).⁽⁵⁹⁾

Post construction, ULBs were left to iron out the details of contracting for all elements of operation and maintenance: operators, caretakers,⁽⁶⁰⁾ cleaners, repairs, water, electricity, cleaning supplies and usables (buckets and mugs for dipping water for anal cleansing and for flushing). The TNUSSP⁽⁶¹⁾ study found that ULBs lacked the capacity to assume these roles. This was complicated by the fact that ULBs did not contract service providers directly, but via subcontractors, who did not meet their contractual obligations, presumably because of the lack of oversight by ULBs unprepared to provide it. Furthermore, ULBs were responsible for providing water and electricity to CT caretakers (whether private or non-profit) despite limited tax revenues. If ULBs fell short, then these functions and utilities – and their costs – by default fell to users. Their lack of funds for spare parts⁽⁶²⁾ or training in repair, among other factors, then resulted in inadequate cleaning, a lack of repair and diminished revenue.⁽⁶³⁾

As described at the start of this article, the effects of deficient operation and maintenance are visible on the ground through the state of CTs in informal settlements in India. The TNUSSP study noted that of 23 CTs built in informal settlements, four were unusable, due to incomplete construction and/or significant damage to facilities. Of the remaining 19 in use:

• none had soap, stymieing SBM-U goals for good hygiene

• 75 per cent had dirty porcelain fixtures (urinals, pans) and stalls

• 40 per cent had wet floors (puddled or waterlogged)

• 40 per cent had menstrual waste in stalls or stuffed into gaps in walls, windows and roofs

• only three had waste bins

• none had a fixed operating time

• none had a fixed cleaning schedule

The quote below provides insight into the experience of one woman, who highlighted her reluctance to use CTs:

“The public toilets are very dirty. Women chew tobacco and spit in the corners. They use the toilets to dump their sanitary napkins [on window sills, in toilet pans and corners]. Seeing all this, I once vomited when I used the toilet. Since then I prefer to avoid going in there if I can.” (Woman, Pune)⁽⁶⁴⁾

The initial “citizen practice” of residents, meeting state expectations, was to use CTs when they were new, functional, clean and free of charge. This demonstrates, first, that maintenance has to be part and parcel of sanitation infrastructure and, second, that citizens have agency and choice. To establish continuous usage and subsequent public health benefits, maintenance and repair must be inextricably linked to construction; and ongoing state engagement is required to sustain usage. As Armand et al.⁽⁶⁵⁾ found, would-be users tended to choose OD over inadequate, unclean CTs, even when aware of the health and safety risks. CTs thus motivate OD, rather than halt it. When users avoid uncleaned CTs, they eventually go completely out of use.

Moreover, maintenance and repair are immediate needs for shared sanitation, which highlights the inappropriateness of handing these tasks to ULBs without preparing them to contract and manage operators prior to the opening of CTs. Despite the state’s plan that ULBs would contract maintenance, the implicit expectation was that, if they did not or could not do so, those with access to CTs would clean the toilets themselves.⁽⁶⁶⁾ In O’Reilly’s field experience, CT users were not directly asked to clean toilets. Even those from caste sub-groups typically charged with this stigmatized work had not considered organizing it, much less doing it. The result was the neglect of sanitation infrastructure and an absence of responsibility, as the following quotes illustrate:

“No one takes ownership of cleaning them.” (Kabir Agarwal, reporter for The Wire)⁽⁶⁷⁾

“SBM-U officials didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment about these problems [of lack of maintenance].”⁽⁶⁸⁾

“We are not able to get any workers to clean the facilities on a regular basis, and that’s why it is closed.” (Tiruchirapalli municipal corporation official)⁽⁶⁹⁾

Users’ experiences of the day-to-day condition of CT infrastructure, especially relating to cleanliness,⁽⁷⁰⁾ re-formed practices and expectations of citizenship among users. Yet, rather than accept the need and responsibility for maintenance, the state instead framed the continuation of OD by slum dwellers despite CT provision as uncivilized and/or uneducated, and used this framing both to reinforce the idea that users were primarily responsible for toilet use and upkeep, and to justify harsh measures, like public shaming, to curb it:⁽⁷¹⁾

“We always try to promote positive behaviour and have issued a number of advisories because, essentially, naming and shaming is very short-term. We want to make sure that there is no pressure on people. Ultimately, we want them to understand why a toilet is important.” (Parameswaran Iyer, Union Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation)⁽⁷²⁾

“[People are reluctant to clean and empty a toilet] but the attitude is changing.” (Parameswaran Iyer, Union Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation)⁽⁷³⁾

“This [humiliation tactics] is required in initial phases [of toilet building]. Once there is understanding [that they should be used, always], we will phase it out.” (Satish Umrikar, PhD, Water Supply & Sanitation Department, Government of Maharashtra)⁽⁷⁴⁾

“An effective communication drive aims to focus on the need to overcome the user’s socio-economic traditions and beliefs.” (Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation)⁽⁷⁵⁾

“The Clean India Mission has bracketed the ‘Clean Middle Class elites’ against the ‘Dirty Poor Ghettoized mass’.” (Harish Wankhede, PhD)⁽⁷⁶⁾

Communities that received CTs rejected the state’s expectation that they assume responsibility for maintenance, whether by paying for a caretaker with user fees or maintaining the CT themselves. They had learned the public health and behaviour-change messages that accompanied the SBM-U building campaign, only to find that CTs were less palatable and safe than OD, even for women, who are most at risk of sexual assault and harassment.⁽⁷⁷⁾ CT users know the health hazards associated with OD, so the ongoing practice signalled rejection of a citizenship relationship in which the state sought to offload the burden of maintenance post-delivery of infrastructure.

IV. The Production of a New Sanitary Citizen

In this section, we analyse the state’s expectations and practices for new sanitation citizenship among CT beneficiaries, and users’ citizenship actions in response to these through toilet use and maintenance. The GOI’s policies indicated both the extent and limitations of the role it envisaged for itself, but also the homogeneous urban “poor” it imagined (despite their tens of millions) and the expectations it set for the behaviours and practices of new “sanitary citizens” with access to sanitation (and ceasing OD). Ironically, the state was later forced to modify its intervention in response to the maintenance failures arising from this approach.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Citizens welcomed the construction of sanitation infrastructure, but expected that the state would ensure its complete construction, and ongoing maintenance and repair. As CTs fell into disrepair or uncleanliness, citizens asserted their claim to citizenship through their refusal to use these poorly maintained CTs, or to maintain them themselves, favouring the resumption of OD.

As shown above, and as Lemanski⁽⁷⁹⁾ points out, an immediate disjuncture in the state–citizen contract occurs when the state sees the provision of infrastructure as the end of its engagement with beneficiaries, while citizens do not. In the construction phase of CTs, the Indian state and citizens shared an understanding of infrastructure as an obligation of the state to build and for citizens to use it. However, the state assumed that both IHHL and CT infrastructure would be welcomed by citizens regardless of its form (or that they would participate in ensuring an appropriate design), and that citizens – imagined as those who understood the importance of use and care of the infrastructure provided – would relieve the state of further responsibility by paying for maintenance or undertaking it themselves. For, as Amin⁽⁸⁰⁾ indicates in his exploration of “the good city”, continuous maintenance and repair of infrastructure is vital, and is dependent upon political will and political economy to function smoothly. This dependence, of course, results in uneven maintenance and repair, thereby demonstrating that maintenance and repair, in order to be universal and just in their provisioning, require an explicit, progressive politics to ensure the everyday liveability and benefits of infrastructure access for all urban inhabitants.

Prior to the SBM-U, the state had built infrastructure and subsequently withdrawn, without establishing explicitly its expectations of citizenship from households. However, under the SBM-U, the state pursued an infrastructure-focused, behaviour-change compliance, and, although it made provision in principle for maintenance (via ULBs), it failed to ensure that the institutional capacity for guaranteeing those maintenance arrangements was in place. It thus saw its obligation as exclusively the provision of CT hardware, while citizens expected both the hardware and its maintenance and repair. Most importantly, however, with the onset of the SBM-U campaign, citizens became aware of the state’s promises, and expected that the state would maintain CTs, especially in light of its behaviour-change messages. Citizens thus perceived the citizenship contract to include maintenance and repair. In its absence, they felt excluded from provision in much the same way as they had been in earlier national sanitation schemes. If the state was not prepared to fulfil its obligations to maintain CTs, then citizens felt it should work out how to provide IHHLs, even in technically complex environments, so that they could avoid the disadvantages of CTs, including the burden of maintenance.

Furthermore, although SBM-U policy reflected an on-paper understanding of the varying geographies of informal settlements,⁽⁸¹⁾ in practice, it saw only a homogeneous “poor”. By decoupling provision of sanitation infrastructure from housing tenure, the SBM-U extended citizenship rights to all urban, informal settlers through the provision of CTs as a minimum standard. The extension of citizenship rights through the construction of sanitation infrastructure enabled the state to bring those living in informal settlements into its disciplinary orbit. The urban dweller who gained access to sanitation was not simply regarded as a citizen, but a certain kind of compliant citizen, i.e. one who used sanitation infrastructure and ceased OD – in other words, a new sanitary citizen.

This forging of a new sanitary citizen through sanitation policy thus initiated a new relationship that instituted new rights for citizens, but also an expectation of new civic duties by the state. The double-edged sword of sanitation for all was that, with delivery of that metric, the Indian government considered it had then fulfilled its obligation – once and for all – to deliver sanitation to the urban poor. A citizen contract was embedded within any newly constructed CT that hinged on citizen expectations of the continuing engagement of the state and the state’s expectations that citizens use and take responsibility for CT maintenance and repair. This, in turn, required Indian citizens to be informed, to change their behaviour (i.e. cease OD), to maintain infrastructure (i.e. not free-ride), and to act on behalf of the whole country (i.e. contribute to ODF status). CTs therefore illustrate how state–citizen relations were both challenged and sustained by expectations of and capacities for infrastructure maintenance.

Nevertheless, the Indian state has come to realise that engagement with maintenance and repair is the only way to achieve the public health and image benefits of ODF status. Through its ODF+ campaign,⁽⁸²⁾ the GOI has come to recognize the need for CT management and maintenance, yet its guidelines remain focused on ULBs, public–private partnerships, community-based organizations and user groups as means of ensuring caretaking of CTs in an effort to eradicate OD permanently. The need for GOI engagement has become especially apparent in relation to faecal sludge and septage management (FSSM), that is, the disposal and treatment of sewage beyond CTs.⁽⁸³⁾ Presently, it is not feasible for communities to take charge of sewage disposal beyond their settlements, as this requires either a connection to the trunk sewerage system, or arrangements for septic tank emptying. This clearly shows the limitations of GOI expectations of community sanitation management. In response, the centrally funded and operated Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) was launched to address urban sewerage systems. Just as the SBM-U established new expectations between citizens and the state regarding safe sanitation, ODF+ and AMRUT demonstrate both the fact and the necessity of the ongoing nature of the relationship. As sanitation infrastructure expanded, so too did the responsibilities and actions of the state through policy and expenditure. The initiatives of ODF+ and FSSM showed that the one-off event of providing CTs as a citizenship right was not a relationship to urban citizens that the state itself was able to sustain.

Our argument for sanitation citizenship is thus threefold. First, through toilet construction, the state imagined a new relationship with citizens regarding sanitation. By providing toilets, it recognized those living in informal settlements, but expected in return that they would behave properly – by using CTs and halting OD. For the state, the shifting materiality of sanitation infrastructure was not its concern; construction and provision were envisaged as singular. Second, by (not) using and (not) maintaining toilets, residents of informal settlements articulated new and different expectations regarding their relationship with the state: sanitation infrastructure was desirable, but there was a threshold beyond which they would not tolerate dirty or unsafe facilities. Third, framing sanitation infrastructure over its life course through a lens of sanitation citizenship displays the disjuncture between state and citizen expectations of citizenship, most notably with regard to the responsibility for maintenance.

The lens of sanitation citizenship elucidates the extent to which the needs and desires of the state and citizens are aligned: many informal settlers prefer not to go for OD, but poorly maintained sanitation infrastructure drives this response. Contrary to the contested narrative that “poor, uneducated” people will not change their behaviour, a return to OD can be understood as a rejection of the citizenship contract offered by the state. While perceptions and definitions of citizenship on each side appear to conflict, there is an opportunity to create a shared definition of “sanitation citizenship” that may bring India closer to achieving sustainable urban sanitation in informal settlements. Creating a shared definition of sanitation citizenship cannot start with a stance by state policymakers that citizens will accept the continuation of the prior citizenship contract (i.e. state withdrawal) after the delivery of infrastructure. If CTs are to be used – and more broadly, if India is to truly become ODF – the disjuncture between the state’s plan to withdraw after building infrastructure versus citizens’ demands for maintenance and repair, must be addressed through continued state engagement. Informal settlers seek a greater connection to the state, in part because the state’s primary relationship to citizens is through infrastructure and it offers an opening for negotiation of an ongoing relationship. Citizens have indicated a willingness to comply with the state’s expectations regarding toilet use but, in turn, they expect the state to assume responsibility for maintenance and repair so that use is viable.

V. Conclusion

The citizenship relationship is as much about infrastructure maintenance as it is about provision. The necessity of maintenance and repair in the case of sanitation highlights that citizenship is a dynamic and multi-directional process: the state assumes that its construction of hardware is sufficient to fulfil both the material needs and the citizenship rights of marginalized communities, but users, in turn, exert their citizenship rights not to use infrastructure that is unmaintained, nor to assume the responsibility or labour for repair. Despite states’ attempts to frame non-use and non-repair of provided infrastructure as non-compliance with citizenship, they become obliged to remain involved in what citizens regard as an ongoing relationship in order to ensure (proper) uptake of that infrastructure. The state–citizen relationship is thus mediated by infrastructure, but also by the condition of that infrastructure, and its maintenance and repair over its life course.

In the case of shared sanitation, maintenance is imperative. While the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) declares that shared sanitation is unsafe sanitation, many in the sector assert that shared sanitation is the only feasible way to improve public health in the world’s lowest-income urban settlements.⁽⁸⁴⁾

By drawing together theories of temporal fragility of infrastructure and infrastructural citizenship, the lens of sanitation citizenship offers several insights. In particular, it enables scrutiny of the relationship between citizens and the state that is created through policy and its implementation, the shared (or otherwise) understandings of that policy, and the actions and narratives of each side in response to the other. In the creation of infrastructure, the state sees “the poor” as desiring or needing what the state provides. It imagines citizenship as a relationship in which grateful and passive citizens accept their new civic duty by engaging with that infrastructure as intended, and within the parameters of its material form, without further expression of their individual needs or desires.⁽⁸⁵⁾ This citizenship contract is one in which highly political decisions about infrastructure are assumed to be acceptable by recipients who have no influence at the levels of government where these decisions are made.

The notion of temporal fragility is key to an investigation of infrastructure because of the myriad ways that decay, maintenance and repair intersect with changing affective conditions, physical labour and political subjectivities over the life course of that infrastructure. Ongoing decay, maintenance and repair transcend the functional purpose of infrastructure, creating new power geometries or destabilising old ones. This is significant for viewing state–citizen relations “through” infrastructure, since utility and convenience are framed as the purpose of state-built infrastructure, but construction alters the citizenship contract. Before construction starts, access to infrastructure must be negotiated by citizens/communities/the state, and access to infrastructure in stages of decay, maintenance and repair must be continually negotiated. States and citizens connect not only in building infrastructure, but also in maintaining it, which runs parallel and simultaneously with the maintenance of the state–citizen contract.

The heterogeneity of citizens’ wants and needs seldom fits into state prescriptions, and citizens view state infrastructure as the means through which they can exercise their rights and understandings of citizenship. While Lemanski⁽⁸⁶⁾ shows how citizens respond by reconfiguring state-sponsored infrastructure to suit their needs, for example through self-built extensions to state housing, we argue that sanitation is a particular case because the dominant response is to stop using it altogether. The citizenship roles were reversed: while the state imagined that it would construct infrastructure and withdraw to shift the responsibility to citizens, it was in fact citizens who withdrew, forcing the state to re-engage with infrastructure maintenance in order to meet its own objectives. The state could not deliver and step back; infrastructure’s temporal fragility looped the state into ongoing negotiations with citizens, who now had a greater claim on the state than before the promise and delivery of infrastructure. Citizenship, then, is not only a contractual arrangement but a power relation that can operate in both directions.

Using the framing of citizenship addresses policy’s blind spot – that of assuming that citizens want nothing more than the provision of hardware. It highlights instead the expectations, perceptions and disappointments that characterize the state–citizen relationship vis-a-vis infrastructure. The state “sees” citizens through infrastructure provision (i.e. those who are provided infrastructure are citizens), and has its own expectations that they will interact with infrastructure in particular ways. Urban dwellers, in turn, act as citizens when they (mis)use, maintain, demolish and repair state-provided infrastructure; but also when they withdraw their willingness to use it. Their actions and expectations indicate what they consider to be their obligation to the state as citizens. In this way, citizens are neither beneficiaries, nor passive recipients, but rather active agents in forcing the state to continuously engage and become more deeply involved in sustaining the sanitation citizenship contract. Citizenship rights are not given by the state, or delivered via infrastructure; rather, they are intrinsic to state–citizen relationships, and the delivery of infrastructure is embedded within that (mis)understanding, leading to development failures that might be better addressed through an approach that teases out this relationship rather than focuses on infrastructure delivery.