India(638m) is followed by Indonesia (58m), China (50m), Ethiopia (49m), Pakistan (48m), Nigeria (33m) and Sudan (17m). In terms of percentage of each country's population resorting to the unhygienic practice, Ethiopia tops the list with 60%, followed by India 54%, Nepal 50%, Pakistan 28%, Indonesia 26%, and China 4%.
18 percent of urban India still defecates in open while the percentage of rural India is as high as 69 percent of the population. It is the key reason why India carries among the highest infectious disease burdens in the world.
The number of open defecators in rural India alone is more than twice those in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report by DFID, the UK's Department for International Development.
The World Bank has estimated that open defecation costs India $54 billion per year or $48 per head. This is more than the Government of India’s entire budget for health.
The UNICEF report says that with only four more years to go until 2015, a major leap in efforts and investments in sanitation is needed to reach the targets of Millennium Development Goals.
After the embarrassing headlines, it appears that Minister Ramesh is ready to step up the efforts to improve sanitation. He is quoted by Times of India as saying that "we are going to focus now on `nirmal gram abhiyan' -- today 25,000 nirmal grams are a tiny fraction of 6 lakh villages. These nirmal grams are in Maharashtra and Haryana. Maharashtra is a success of social movements while Haryana an example of determined state government action."
Here's a video clip of Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh saying "if there was a Nobel Prize for dirt and filth, India would win it hands down":
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Fixing Sanitation Crisis in India
Food, Clothing and Shelter in India and Pakistan
Heavy Disease Burdens in South Asia
Peepli Live Destroys Indian Myths
India After 63 Years of Independence
Poverty Across India 2011
India and Pakistan Contrasted
13 comments:
ok. India is the filthiest, dirtiest, most corrupt country in the world with hungriest, ugliest people performing the most brutal cast and religious practices.
Pakistan must be heaven compared to the hell-hole called India.
Then why do you need to reemphasize it every day, sir?
Should it not be evident?
Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan to champion sanitation campaign in India, reports The Guardian:
Sanitation and hygiene are sensitive and unpopular subjects, but funding them is essential to fighting disease, ensuring basic rights and meeting millennium development goals.
It is hardly the most glamorous role for Shah Rukh Khan, yet "the king of Bollywood" has agreed to lend his name to the cause of sanitation and hygiene, the laggards in the millennium development goals.
Basic sanitation, covering subjects such as toilets, latrines, handwashing and waste, is not an MDG in its own right, instead falling under MDG7 on ensuring environmental sustainability. But sanitation and hygiene have been the poor cousins in the global Wash (water, sanitation and hygiene) work and programmes, outfunded by as much as 13 to one, even though it could be argued that most water-related diseases are really sanitation-related diseases.
As the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said in June, sanitation is a sensitive and unpopular subject, so it is unsurprising it fails to garner much public or official attention – although the UN declared access to water and sanitation a fundamental right in 2010 and there is a UN rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation.
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The problem is stark. As many as 1.2 billion people practice what the UN politely describes as "open defecation". They go to the toilet behind bushes, in fields, in plastic bags or along railway tracks. The practice poses particular problems for women and girls, who can be subject to physical and verbal abuse or humiliation. Sexual harassment and rape are also a risk for women who wait until dark to relieve themselves.
There is a link between sanitation and girls' education as well. Separate toilets at school mean more girls are likely to attend in the first place, and more are likely to stay on after puberty to complete their education. The UN's Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), based in Geneva, suggests that some money from education budgets should go towards providing toilets for students and teachers, with separate facilities for girls, to maximise the impact of the increase in education spending.
Better sanitation would also save lives, as 1.6 million children die every year from diarrhoea, a disease that could be prevented with clean water and basic sanitation. The UN says improving the disposal of human waste can reduce illness due to diarrhoea by 34%. When combined with hand-washing, this impact can be doubled.
As Timeyin Uwejamomere wrote on the Poverty Matters blog this week, a lack of basic toilets and waste management is a severe public health hazard, especially in a dense urban environment where diseases like cholera can spread like wildfire. He noted that in sub-Saharan Africa more children die from diarrhoeal diseases caused by a lack of sanitation and safe water than they do from measles, HIV and Aids, and malaria combined.
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In a sign that sanitation is receiving greater attention, the WSSCC is holding its first-ever global forum on sanitation and hygiene, starting on Sunday in Mumbai, bringing together activists, business leaders, health professionals and governmental officials. This follows a drive launched by the UN in June to accelerate progress towards the goal of halving, by 2015, the proportion of the population without access to basic sanitation.
Indicative of the increasing focus on water, sanitation and hygiene, the UK's Department for International Development is increasing bilateral aid on the problem. Based on Guardian analysis, spending will go up to £113.8m by 2014-15 from £82.9m in 2010-11, a 32% rise. So hats off to Shah Rukh Khan for his willingness to sign on to the Wash cause.
Here's the story of two Indias by World Bank's managing director Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala:
India’s global profile is rising—from a slow-growing poor country to a burgeoning economic power:
· India grew fast before the crisis--9% per year--and has resumed fast growth--8.6% in the fiscal year that ended in March.
· India is globally recognized as a key player in the IT revolution, and in sectors as diverse as pharmaceutical, cement, steel and space
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But there is also another India:
· India’s GNI per capita ($1170) is lower than that of 161 other countries. World Bank’s poverty numbers show 456 million people in India are poor—about one-third of the world’s poor, and more than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
· India lags significantly on health and nutrition targets: It is home to half of world’s underweight children, and it accounts for 1 in 5 maternal and child deaths worldwide.
· Social exclusion remains a stark reality—Scheduled Tribes lag twenty years behind the general population, Scheduled Castes ten years; gender norms can be quite restrictive and gender gap persists in realms such as child mortality and labor force participation.
The 9% growth hides an infrastructure crisis. Innovation in the private sector has often got around this—60% of firms and a large percentage of homes rely on back-up generation, and on an industry of logistical firms. But this has costs, and sooner or later infrastructure constraints will bite, and growth will slow, absent major change. This is especially true in urban areas.
PPPs are often hailed as a solution. Private participation in infrastructure took off in the early 1990s in telecoms and power supply. Highway, port, and airport concessions began to emerge in the late 1990s, with water supply and solid waste management following. We have been here before. In the 1990s Latin America had major infrastructural gaps, and PPPs were thought to be the solution (including by the World Bank). But gaps were effectively closed only in telecoms (which was not an issue for India) and in Chile (a small country with by far the best governance to manage private sector involvement). Elsewhere, there was insufficient private involvement, or private involvement that was high cost, often corrupt, and with frequent renegotiation to extract better deals from the state and society.
The lesson is that improving governance, and solving institutional problems, is unavoidable to improve infrastructure provision, and is necessary for effective private involvement.
The challenge here is so well-known that I do not need to dwell on it much. India has enormous untapped potential—productivity in Eastern states, for instance, is well below what it is in Punjab, and sustainability is an issue in states like Punjab.
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V. Education: Focus on results, not inputs
The two Indias are very visible in education: Graduates of India's famed Institutes of Technology literally drive growth. But basic and secondary education are dismal. In fact, even in tertiary education quality is in islands of excellence, not widespread. The demographic dividend can turn into a demographic curse if the millions of young people entering the labor market every year are not equipped to take up the jobs that a fast-growing economy can create...
At Muzdalafa,they have now built many many decent toilets.But on my last Hujj,back in 1997 with some friends,at Muzdalfa ,late at night I noticed 2 Huge Sudanese men and women releasing their pressure few yards away from our temporary resting place
What are they doing? My wife asked.
Never mind,let's move from here .
Najam,
I think what you saw is the little league compared to the big league of open defecation in India.
Here's a Bloomberg report on sanitation in India:
Until May 2007, Meera Devi rose before dawn each day and walked a half mile to a vegetable patch outside the village of Kachpura to find a secluded place.
Dodging leering men and stick-wielding farmers and avoiding spots that her neighbors had soiled, the mother of three pulled up her sari and defecated with the Taj Mahal in plain view.
With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach, on banks that line rivers used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians. Devi looks back on her routine with pain and embarrassment.
“As a woman, I would have to check where the males were going to the toilet and then go in a different direction,” says Devi, 37, standing outside her one-room mud-brick home. “We used to avoid the daytimes, but if we were really pressured, we would have to go any time of the day, even if it was raining. During the harvest season, people would have sticks in the fields. If somebody had to go, people would beat them up or chase them.”
In the shadow of its new suburbs, torrid growth and 300- million-plus-strong middle class, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency. From the stream in Devi’s village to the nation’s holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of the country’s surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent. Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they’re not already, the Ministry of Urban Development concluded in September.
Economic Drain
Illness, lost productivity and other consequences of fouled water and inadequate sewage treatment trimmed 1.4-7.2 percent from the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2005, according to a study last year by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program.
Sanitation and hygiene-related issues may have a similar if not greater impact on India’s $1.2 trillion economy, says Guy Hutton, a senior water and sanitation economist with the program in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Snarled transportation and unreliable power further damp the nation’s growth. Companies that locate in India pay hardship wages and ensconce employees in self- sufficient compounds.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aErNiP_V4RLc&refer=exclusive
Riaz & Najm:
Amusing!
At least they have learnt how to shun any "mischief".
May be that's why they are next in line for the "super power" slot!
Moazzam,
India is home to the world's largest population of poor, hungry, illiterate and sick people after 64 years of independence.
I can't imagine a superpower with the excessive baggage of hunger, poverty, illiteracy and disease that India has.
http://www.riazhaq.com/2010/08/63-years-after-independence-india.html
Here are some excerpts from an NPR interview of Siddhartha Deb, the author of "The Beautiful and The Damned":
......
DEB: Well, I was interested in the changes that were happening there. Obviously, it's a lot of people experiencing change in new ways, in some sense, and I had gotten the impression that there was a very triumphalist version of this change, which is that the country is doing very well.
There was even a slogan that was coined by one of the political parties. It was called India Shining. And I was going back. I was writing feature articles. I was a freelance writer. And I was somewhat skeptical of this. It was pretty obvious that at the upper levels people were much better off materially than they had been in the past.
But certainly large numbers or swaths of people seem to be untouched or mired in the same poverty, or sometimes even worse because they could now see this incredible contrast. So I wanted to examine that. I wanted to do that by checking, by looking at the new rich. I wanted to look at people who were in the middle, people who were middle class.
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DONVAN: Well, and the style in which the book is written still reads like a novel. It is full of color and texture and even sights and sounds and smells.
DEB: Thank you. That was very much the intention, to write something like a nonfiction novel, if that's possible. So the facts aren't made up, they're very scrupulously researched. I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but I wanted the texture, the flavor of a novel, of people in motion in some sense.
DONVAN: Can I say that the story that you've written reads to me as a very sad story?
DEB: That would be - that's a fairly, I think, reasonable, actually, interpretation. I think it's a sad story to me too, in many ways.
DONVAN: Even among those who feel that you describe - you describe an engineer named Chuck who is building a house. He had lived in the United States, and he's now building a house in the American model. He gives you a tour. He even uses American language. This is the open-plan kitchen, this is the master bedroom.
And yet you portray him as - his desires as being somewhat hollow, as though he's not a happy man himself.
DEB: Well, I mean, I think Chuck would see himself as a happy man, and I think that's reasonable. I've tried to allow people that space. But yes, I as a narrator come in, and I do sometimes question what some of my characters are saying.
So when someone like Chuck says, you know, he did say this, that there are these incredible contrasts in India, but that's okay, we're kind of one big happy family, and I question whether that's really the case, when, you know, you have at the very top end of the country, say you have, say, something like 66 billionaires.
And these numbers might be slightly old, but there are probably a few more billionaires since I last checked. But 66 billionaires who seem to have something like 30 percent of the country's wealth.
On the other end, you have like 800 million people, over 800 million people living on less than $2 a day. When you have a country where 40 percent of the children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition, it seems to me that these contrasts aren't really healthy. They're not just differences. They are really like living different worlds within the same country.
So yes, I actually come in as a narrator, and I question when, say, Chuck is a character, he sees his life as striving and successful. And I think that's reasonable, again, but I also question the fact that this house, this special zone in which the house is constructed, is being built on what is a demolished village, and I have very hard questions......
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=141213308
Sanitation disastrous in India: Jairam Ramesh in Zee News:
New Delhi: Accepting that development of sanitation facilities in the country has been a "disaster", Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh Wednesday suggested enhanced government funding to deal with the issue.
"Sanitation is the biggest blot on the human development portfolio in India. The sanitation situation is disastrous," said Ramesh speaking at the release of UN Human Development Report 2011 here.
"We need massive public funding for sanitation," he said adding there has been marked progress in providing education, and some improvement in making health care and drinking water available in the country.
Making a comparison, Ramesh said while expenditure on water supply was Rs.20,000 crore annually, it was just Rs.2,000 crore on sanitation.
Success in providing education came because of the centre, which bears around 60 percent of the total spending on the sector today, he said.
"Out of 6 lakh villages in the country, only 25,000 are free from the practice of open defecation," the minister said, adding "People do not use toilets due to cultural reasons in many parts of the country."
http://zeenews.india.com/news/health/health-news/sanitation-disastrous-in-india-jairam-ramesh_14412.html
It is official: India has the world's most toxic air, according a news report in The Hindu:
In a study by Yale and Columbia Universities, India holds the very last rank among 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health.
India scored a miniscule 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the analysis, lagging far behind the next worst performer, Bangladesh, which scored 13.66. In fact, the entire South Asian region fares badly, with Nepal, Pakistan and China taking up the remaining spots in the bottom five of the rankings.
These rankings are part of a wider study to index the nations of the world in terms of their overall environmental performance. The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information Network have brought out the Environment Performance Index rankings every two years since 2006.
In the overall rankings — which takes 22 policy indicators into account — India fared minimally better, but still stuck in the last ten ranks along with environmental laggards such as Iraq, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. At the other end of the scale, the European nations of Switzerland, Latvia and Norway captured the top slots in the index.
India's performance over the last two years was relatively good in sectors such as forests, fisheries, biodiversity and climate change. However, in the case of water — both in terms of the ecosystem effects to water resources and the human health effects of water quality — the Indian performance is very poor.
The Index report was presented at the World Economic Forum currently taking place in Davos, where it's being pitched as a means to identify the leaders and the laggards on energy and environmental challenges prior to the iconic Rio+20 summit on sustainable development to be held in Brazil this June.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article2837739.ece
http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/rankings
A newly-wed woman in a village in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh recently left her husband's home because the house had no toilet, reports BBC:
Anita Narre returned eight days later after her husband, a daily wage worker, built one with savings and aid from villagers.
An NGO announced a $10,000 reward for Mrs Narre for her "brave" decision and forcing her husband to build a toilet.
More than half a billion Indians still lack access to basic sanitation.
The problem is acute in rural India and it is the women who suffer most.
Mrs Narre's husband, Shivram, said he was not able to build a toilet at home because of lack of money.
He admitted that his wife returned home only after he constructed one with his savings and "some support from the village council".
"It is not nice for women to go outside to defecate. That's why every home should have a toilet. Those who don't should make sure there is one," Mrs Narre told the BBC.
Many people in India do not have access to flush toilets or other latrines.
But under new local laws in states like Chhattisgarh, representatives are obliged to construct a flush toilet in their own home within a year of being elected. Those who fail to do so face dismissal.
The law making toilets mandatory has been introduced in several Indian states as part of the "sanitation for all" drive by the Indian government.
The programme aims to eradicate the practice of open defecation, which is common in rural and poor areas of India.
Special funds are made available for people to construct toilets to promote hygiene and eradicate the practice of faeces collection - or scavenging - which is mainly carried out by low-caste people.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17022847
Dr. Haq,
Our Pakistani Parliamentarians recently visited India (East Punjab).
And exactly as you have always maintained, they were SHOCKED to see widespread open defecation! Ha!
QUOTE on Page 4: "It was shocking to see so many people defecating on the roadside, and with an abandon that was somehow difficult to imagine for Pakistanis..."
Here is the article:
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-pakistani-s-first-hand-experience-in-india/20121023.htm
Here's a Reuters' piece on absence of hygiene in India:
My Indian friends and I joke around a lot about me as the typical white American guy visiting India. Cows! Con men! Colors! Most people I’ve met in India have restricted their reactions to my westerner-in-the-east experiences to gentle teasing. When I stuck a picture of a man urinating in public on my Facebook page, calling it one more picture of what you see everywhere you go in India, people weren’t as patient. What was I doing? Insulting the nation? Focusing on the ugly because it’s what all the westerners do when they visit India? Why does India provoke such visceral reactions in visitors?
Public urination, public defecation, dirt, garbage, filth, the poor living on the street — talking about these things, even acknowledging that they’re in front of your face, risks making your hosts unhappy, and possibly angry. It’s the third rail of India, and the voltage can be lethal. That’s why I was surprised when B.S. Raghavan decided to touch it with all 10 fingers.
Raghavan’s column in The Hindu Business Line newspaper begins with this headline: Are Indians by nature unhygienic?
Consider these excerpts:
From time to time, in their unguarded moments, highly placed persons in advanced industrial countries have burst out against Indians for being filthy and dirty in their ways of life. A majority of visitors to India from those countries complain of “Delhi belly” within a few hours of arrival, and some fall seriously ill.
There is no point in getting infuriated or defensive about this. The general lack of cleanliness and hygiene hits the eye wherever one goes in India — hotels, hospitals, households, work places, railway trains, airplanes and, yes, temples. Indians think nothing of spitting whenever they like and wherever they choose, and living in surroundings which they themselves make unliveable by their dirty habits. …
Open defecation has become so rooted in India that even when toilet facilities are provided, the spaces round temple complexes, temple tanks, beaches, parks, pavements, and indeed, any open area are covered with faecal matter. …
Even as Indians, we are forced to recoil with horror at the infinite tolerance of fellow Indians to pile-ups of garbage, overflowing sewage, open drains and generally foul-smelling environs.
There’s plenty more that you can read in that story, but I’ll direct you to the article. I’ll also ask you some questions:
Some people say you shouldn’t point out these problems, and that every country has problems. Do you agree with this statement? Why?
Does anyone disagree with Raghavan’s descriptions of these sights and smells?
Is this even a problem? Or should people get used to it?
Should visitors, especially ones from countries where people are generally wealthier, say nothing, and pretend that they don’t see unpleasant things?
As for me, I can say this: I got used to it, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t notice it. Indians notice it too. Otherwise, people wouldn’t suggest public shaming campaigns against people urinating in public, they wouldn’t threaten fines for doing it, and they wouldn’t respond with relief to plans to finally make sure that toilets on India’s trains don’t open directly onto the tracks. Of course, these are people in India. It’s a family, taking care of business the family way.
As for me, the message usually seems to be: “If you don’t love it, leave it.” It would be nice if there were some other answer. Acknowledging problems, even ones that are almost impossible to solve, makes them easier to confront.
http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2012/11/17/indians-inherently-unhygienic-indian-writer-touches-third-rail/
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