Articles / Newsletter
19-Nov-2016 | 
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Ratna Devi Nadarajan (Secretary-general - Forum Air Malaysia)
NOVEMBER 19 was designated by the United Nations as World Toilet Day to bring attention to the global sanitation crisis particularly in poor and low income societies.
The sustainable development goals (SDG) launched in 2015 include a target to ensure everyone everywhere has access to toilets by 2030.
Most of us in Malaysia have ready access to a toilet or sanitation facility and we tend to take these for granted. But there are people living in remote areas of this country who still do not have proper toilets. In urban areas, access to toilets is never an issue, whether these toilets are functional and well maintained is.
In Japan, students are required to take turns to clean school toilets, and proper use of public toilets is inculcated in people from a very young age.
However, many Malaysian parents view cleaning of toilets as a demeaning activity and do not want their children to be involved. In the late 1970s, I studied in a former missionary school where gotong royong activities among students included cleaning the toilets. Nowadays, holding a gotong royong is rare, what more the cleaning of school toilets by students.
There have been numerous challenges in the development of sanitation infrastructure, which is a very capital intensive effort, in Malaysia. By the time the water and sanitation restructuring efforts began in the mid-2000s, the service provider was already operating at a loss and owing the Government billions of ringgit. The sector was going back and forth with privatisation plans while proposals to charge for sanitation services in the 1990s were opposed by consumer groups.
So, is our sanitation sector any better since the restructuring efforts in 2006?
Hundreds of millions of ringgit have been spent to establish a connected sewerage system in Malaysia and a new billing system will be introduced soon. This is necessary as more than 50% of river pollution in this country is due to untreated sewage which often comes from poorly maintained septic tank facilities in homes or commercial and government premises. Awareness campaigns carried out on a piecemeal basis have not created widespread action among the owners of premises to desludge their septic tanks regularly (once every three to five years). Furthermore, many homeowners are almost never aware of their leaking or overflowing septic tanks until a foul stench permeates into their homes.
With a connected sewerage system, owners of homes and other establishments would not have to worry about desludging but only remember to pay their sanitation bills.
However, real estate developers, sanitation service providers and water and sanitation regulatory agencies must ensure full accountability in planning, construction and maintenance of sanitation services. Problems have surfaced in several housing projects, in Klang and Sepang for example, when these requirements were ignored. Residents in these areas are now living with overflowing toilets and their foul stench, some for up to a decade now, due to a flaw in the design and operation of the sanitation infrastructure!
In some areas, local governments have dismantled communal septic tanks to make way for other buildings, further contributing to raw water pollution.
For the design and construction of public toilet facilities, there is already a rating scheme – Malaysian Standards (MS) for public toilet – developed by the Department of Standards Malaysia. However, the standards and rating scheme does not emphasise the type of sewerage system and the need for desludging.
Such situations erode the ratepayers’ confidence in the service providers and regulatory agencies while the general public are held to ransom by a single provider when quality of service is deplorable. In a market that is not competitive (single player), the regulators play a crucial role in protecting the end users (consumers).
It is difficult to claim ourselves a developed nation if we cannot handle even the most basic form of services such as water and sanitation. The World Bank has reported that low and middle income countries tend to have higher levels of financial leakages in the water and sanitation utility sectors. The Sabah Water Department’s mismanagement of funds is an example of how this can happen.
Everyone has a part to play in raising the standard of our sanitation services: regulators, real estate developers, service providers, you and me. Let’s begin with ourselves. Let’s clean up and treat toilets as one of the most important facilities in our daily lives not only on World Toilet Day but every day!