665 million Indian defecate in the open space

665 million Indians defecate openly

A joint study by the World Health organisation and UNICEF ‘Diarrhoea: Why Children Are Still Dying and What Can Be Done’, also pointed out that India has the largest number of persons that defecate in the open worldwide. Out of a total of 2.5 billion people worldwide that defecate openly, 665 million belong to India.  Some 88 per cent of diarrhoeal deaths worldwide are attributable to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

More than half of India’s 203 million households lack what Western societies consider a necessity: a toilet. With a population of more than 14 million, Delhi has a mere 3,300 public toilets and each morning tens of thousands of people relieve themselves in the open.

“The cause of many of our diseases is the condition of our lavatories and our bad habit of disposing of excreta anywhere and everywhere,” Mahathma Gandhi wrote in 1925. “Sanitation is more important than political independence,” he declared.

Even after after independence, India still has the greatest proportion of people in Asia behind Nepal without access to improved sanitation, according to Unicef.   “Improving access to safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and promoting good hygiene are key components in preventing diarrhoea,” the report said noting that one in four persons in the developing world do not use clean toilets. The problem is further compounded by unsafe disposal of children faeces in developing countries, the study said.

Today, 59 percent of the people in India’s countryside have access to a toilet, compared with 27 percent in 2004, the Department of Drinking Water Supply says.  Ten million toilets have been built annually since 2007.  But more than 30 million households are waiting.

But the fact is much more worse in cities. New Delhi’s 17 percent of city residents, or 50 million people, don’t have toilets.  Fewer than 10 percent of Indian cities have a sewage system.  About 36 per cent of the cases of malaria and more than 67 per cent of the malaria deaths in Maharashtra state occur in Mumbai alone.  About 37 percent of urban wastewater flows into the environment untreated, where such pathogens as rotavirus, campylobacter and human roundworm can spread via water, soil, food and unwashed hands.

“It is a tragedy that diarrhoea, which is little more than an inconvenience in the developed world, kills an estimated 1.5 million children each year,” Ann M Veneman, UNICEF chief said. The chief further noted, that though inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhoea exist, in developing countries only 39 per cent of children receive the recommended treatment.

The report also underlines that recent introduction of zinc tablets into treatment programmes in India and Pakistan has helped children fight off diarrhoea more effectively. Zinc has been associated with a 25 per cent reduction in the duration of acute diarrhoea, as well as a 40 per cent reduction in treatment failure and death in persistent diarrhoea.

It also states that handwashing with soap is the most cost effective intervention for reducing child deaths as it lowers the incidence of diarrhoeal disease by over 40 per cent. The study also presents a seven-point plan to reduce diarrhoea deaths, which include: replacing body fluids to prevent dehydration, zinc treatments to build immunity, immunisation against rotavirus and measles, improved water supply, sanitation and hand washing with soap.

The public toilet, in the town of Musiri in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, gives users as much as 12 U.S. cents a month for their excreta. Feces are composted and urine, which is 95 percent water and has already passed through the body’s own filter, the kidneys, is collected, stored in drums and used as fertilizer for bananas and other food crops in a two-year research project by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

Read the report from WHO website