Every day, Suman, 32, wakes up early, fills up a lota or a plastic water bottle and walks out to the forest adjoining the Kirby Place slum in central Delhi to relieve herself. As do hundreds of men, women and children from the slum. Kirby Place is supposed to be “open defecation free”, like, according to a declaration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Gandhi Jayanti in 2019, all the rest of India.
Kirby Place is barely 10 km from the prime minister’s residence in New Delhi.
