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By the end of the Millennium Development Goal's target year, 2015, India had been declared as a country, which has made moderate progress in terms of improvement in basic sanitation provision for all. Yet open defecation is still a regular practice of a significant proportion of the population in both urban and rural areas. The Indian government has been trying to address this problem for the last three decades through different programmes. However, though the effort is laudable, in reality, the countrywide situation is not so praiseworthy. Lack of sanitation provisions affects people in different ways with different intensities along the lines of class, gender, age, disability, and marginality. In Darjeeling city, due to lack of proper sanitation facilities, a significant portion of the population uses public toilets, which are less in number compared to the demand. People face a variety of difficulties and hurdles in using public toilets, and as a result, continue to practice open defecation during the night and early morning. Among the users, women and adolescent girls suffer more than the others. Moreover, in this city, a significant portion of the population faces acute water crisis during the dry months. This empirical study tries to explore the different ways through which women and adolescent girls are affected by the lack of safe sanitation facilities within the house premises. The article also argues that lack of sanitation provision should be considered as a matter of violence against women and adolescent girls because the situation makes them vulnerable to the risk of being violated or sexually abused.

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Water crisis is such a phenomenon that almost every city experiences to some extent these days. Nature, dimensions, and impact of the crisis vary based on spatial diversity. This article attempts to critically analyse the nature of water crisis and to find out the reasons behind such crisis in Darjeeling city. The city’s public water supply is mainly controlled by the municipal authority, and water is supplied from the Senchal lakes. The centralised system, developed by the British in the early nineteenth century, is not sufficient for the entire city at present, and not affordable for all classes as well. Primarily the scarcity emerged due to the city’s population growth, and the city’s changing commercial nature, especially the booming tourism sector. And the age-old water infrastructure cannot cope with the fast-growing demand for water. Moreover, still now municipal authority does not consider a large number of transitory population, while calculating the water demand. Massive gap exists between the actual water scarcity observed in the field and the scarcity shown in the official data. Therefore, a reconsideration of municipal water budget is required to manage water resources and services sustainably. Using both the quantitative and qualitative methods, this empirical study critically assesses the existing gap between demand and supply, and also explores the process of illegal flow of water thus making the scarcity even more intense. It argues for fair and active water governance to minimise the demand–supply gap, and active community participation to ensure water justice to the commons.