Where Does She Go?
The Invisible Crisis of Women and Public Toilets in Indian Cities
In Kolkata, where I live, public toilets are rare. You can walk long stretches of busy roads and not find a single usable facility. Yet this absence is not treated as a crisis. It is not debated passionately. It is not framed as an emergency. It is simply absorbed into the background -- another "chalta hai" reality.
But the absence of toilets does not affect everyone equally.
Men urinate openly on the sides of roads, against walls. It is normalized. It is tolerated. The city silently accommodates it. Even open toilets for men are much more common than public toilets for women.
But where does a woman go?
That question should disturb us. Because the honest answer, for millions of women, is: nowhere.
The narrative we tell ourselves
On social media, one often encounters rhetoric about how much men "sacrifice" for their families -- especially from red-pilled spaces that romanticize male hardship and physical labour. There is constant imagery of men working outdoors, enduring heat, breaking their backs to provide.
But this narrative conveniently erases something fundamental.
Women make up a significant portion of India's informal labour force -- construction workers, agricultural labourers, domestic workers, street vendors. Many of them perform physically demanding jobs under harsh conditions. And unlike men, their labour rarely ends at the worksite. They return home to cook, clean, care for children, care for elders -- often within families they married into, where expectations are rigid and uncompromising.
And in public spaces, they navigate structural disadvantages that most men do not even have to think about.
Layered Disadvantage
The first disadvantage is safety. Indian streets are widely known to be unsafe for women, particularly after dark. Every woman learns early how to calculate risk -- which road to take, what time to return, what to wear.
Even attire reflects constraint. I have seen female labourers working in extreme heat wearing skin-tight blouses and ghunghta over their heads, bound by expectations of modesty even while carrying bricks and mixing cement. In contrast, I have seen male labourers work shirtless in the same sun.
This is not praise for one and condemnation for the other. The entire structure of exploitation is unjust. But the point is clear: women face compounded restrictions -- social, cultural, physical.
And then there is sanitation.
The basic question no one asks
Where does a woman go when she needs to urinate?
In cities with scarce public toilets, men have an unofficial workaround: public urination. Women do not.
For poor women working outdoors, the options are grim. Some search for bushes. Some wait until dark. Some find isolated, unsafe corners. Many simply hold it for hours.
Holding urine for extended periods is not a minor discomfort. It increases the risk of urinary tract infections and kidney problems. But beyond health, it creates a daily background anxiety -- a constant mental calculation.
Even middle-class women are not spared. I have seen my girlfriend, my mother, my sister deliberately avoid drinking water before long trips. I have watched them choose thirst over the uncertainty of finding a clean and safe toilet.
Imagine structuring your hydration around fear.
Imagine planning your public mobility around bladder capacity.
The culture of silence
What makes this crisis worse is how rarely it is discussed.
Indian society attaches shame to women's bodily functions. Menstruation is taboo. Reproductive health is whispered about. Even something as universal and natural as urination becomes embarrassing when women speak about it.
As a result, the issue never reaches the level of policy urgency it deserves. It is treated as a private inconvenience rather than a public infrastructure failure.
But sanitation is not a private matter when half the population cannot safely access it in public.
A city designed without women
Urban design reflects whose needs are prioritized.
When cities lack accessible, clean, and safe public toilets for women, they effectively limit women's mobility. They reduce their comfort in public spaces. They indirectly discourage workforce participation, street-level entrepreneurship, and long-duration commuting.
Infrastructure is never neutral. It encodes power.
If men can improvise in public space but women cannot, then the city is not gender-neutral. It is structurally biased.
And the most marginalized women -- daily wage labourers, street vendors, migrant workers -- bear the heaviest burden.
This is about dignity
The lack of toilets is not just a sanitation issue. It is a dignity issue.
Freedom is not abstract. It is the ability to drink water without fear. It is the ability to work a full day without silently enduring physical pain. It is the ability to move through a city without planning your body around infrastructure failure.
We often debate women's empowerment in grand terms -- representation, careers, leadership. But empowerment begins with something far more basic: the right to exist in public space without bodily distress.
If our cities cannot provide that, then we are failing at something fundamental.
The next time you walk past a wall stained with public urination, ask yourself: If she cannot do the same, where does she go?