Geetanjali Krishna: Cess pool or compost heap?

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

It’s an undeniable fact of life. You drink water, you make water.

There’s just no getting around it. In Leh, this water business drove me nuts. To stave off the effects of the high altitude, we were advised to drink as much as five litres of water a day. And so several times a day, I found myself in a traditional Ladakhi composting toilet.

To be honest, I hadn’t known they existed till I was first directed to one, a couple of kilometres beyond Leh.

The western sensibility of cleanliness is that it isn’t clean if it isn’t flushed away with lots of clean water that could have been well used for something else. Instead, Ladakhi loos adapt to the rigours of the region’s extreme dryness and aridity. Instead of water — sand, ash and straw is mixed with waste, to help it decompose into a humus-like material which is used to enrich the soil. The air is so dry there that the waste gets desiccated within months. And no, if used properly, these loos don’t stink.

Let me describe how they look: They’re double-storeyed, with the composting unit on the lower level.

You climb up some steps to the loo, a sand and straw-covered floor with a hole opening into the composting unit. After every use, the waste, straw and sand is swept into the composting unit through the hole, and a fresh layer is added. Ashes from the kitchen are also thrown in occasionally. For the long winter (September to May), a supply of soil is piled into one corner of the toilet room upstairs to be used when required. In less than a year, the stuff in the composting unit is ready to be sprinkled out on the fields. No sewage, no stinky drains, no wastage of water.

Imagine my surprise when I was shown a Western-style loo in Leh Bazaar, best described as hell on earth. “Why don’t you also have a traditional toilet?” I asked the shopkeeper who’d led me there. He retorted, “Why? Can’t we also have nice Western toilets?” The traditional ones seemed much better to me (this one didn’t even seem to be connected to a sewer).

Yet, more and more urban Ladakhis have replaced traditional toilets with Western ones. Not only has this caused a huge problem of sewage disposal (which was non-existent earlier), it’s also increased the demand for water in this high-altitude desert. I was walking around in parts of Old Leh, where narrow lanes and steps connect houses crammed close to one another. The lanes were overflowing with sewage, and I wondered how it affects the health and quality of life of locals.

“Western style toilets are tough to maintain here,” said Rinchen, a local girl I got chatting with while she was waiting for her turn at the municipal tap. “Water supply is so erratic, just keeping them clean is a strain!” said she. Also, in the long winter when temperatures reach sub-zero, the pipes freeze. Environmentalists point out that sewage is now contaminating ground water and some is being simply drained into the irrigation systems of agricultural areas around Leh.

“My parents have a traditional toilet, but they live on a farm,” said Rinchen, “living in Leh, I’ve neither sand to put in the loo, nor any land to spread the compost on.” I left her to fill her buckets, reflecting that it can’t be easy for urban Ladakhis who no longer have the sort of connection with land which their parents did. Which path do they choose, caught so as to speak, between the compost heap and the cess pool?