Over 300 million Indians still defecate in the open: WHO-UNICEF report

By Kundan Pandey,   Down to Earth,   May 15, 2013, 

Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan do much better in improving access to sanitation

One-third of the world’s population, about 2.4 billion people, will remain without access to improved sanitation in 2015, according to a report recently published  jointly by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF). The report says that three south Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal have shown significant improvement in the past 20 years. In India, however, more than the quarter of the population still practices open defecation.

The report, titled Progress on sanitation and drinking-water 2013 update, warns that at the current rate of progress, the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of people without sanitation compared to 1990 will be missed by 8 per cent – or half a billion people. The report, which is based on data collected in 2011 with updated information, was published on May 13.

East Asia tops among good performers

While three countries of South Asia – Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal – have been deemed good performers, India has less than 50 per cent of its people using improved sanitation (see figure 1).

Bangladesh, with 32 per cent of total population practising open defecation in 1990, has shown an annual decline of 9.9 per cent to a figure of 4 per cent in 2011 (see table). Pakistan showed an annual decline rate of 3.9 per cent, lowering its open defecation figures from 52 per cent to 29 per cent. Nepal too has lowered its open defecation figures from 84 per cent of the population in 1990 to 43 per cent in 2011. This amounts to an annual decline rate of 3.2 per cent.

According to a region-wide assessment, eastern Asia has performed better than any other region in the world. The report says, “Greatest progress has been made in eastern Asia, where sanitation cove-

-rage has increased from 27 per cent in 1990 to 67 per cent in 2011. This amounts to more than 626 million people gaining access to improved sanitation facilities over a 21-year period.” (see figure 2)

Sanitation for progress

“There is an urgent need to ensure all the necessary pieces are in place – political commitment, funding, leadership – so the world can accelerate progress and reach the Millennium Development Goal sanitation target,” says Maria Neira, WHO Director for Public Health and Environment. “The world can turn around and transform the lives of millions who still do not have access to basic sanitation. The rewards would be immense for health, ending poverty at its source, and well-being,” she adds.

The report echoes the urgent call to action by United Nations deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson for the world community to combine efforts and end open defecation by 2025. With less than three years to go to reach the MDG deadline, WHO and UNICEF have called for a final push to meet the sanitation target.

"This is an emergency no less horrifying than a massive earthquake or tsunami," says Sanjay Wijesekera, global head of UNICEF's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme. “Every day hundreds of children are dying; every day thousands of parents mourn their sons and daughters. We can and must act in the face of this colossal daily human tragedy.”

Open defecation due to lack of access to sanitation poses a hazard to public health. Exposure to human excreta or its contamination of drinking water sources, causes a host of illnesses such as cholera, dysentery,  typhoid, polio and infections with E coli and tapeworm. Such exposure can even cause epidemics.

Ronnie Screwvala’s Big Plan for Rural India

By Arti Megha Bahree     http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/03/ronnie-screwvalas-big-plan-for-rural-india/ Apr 3, 2013

Swades Foundation  Ronnie Screwvala.

On a recent day, about 120 men sat on chairs in rows in a community hall in Matunga, a Mumbai suburb. All migrants, they had left their villages in the districts of Ratnagiri and Raigad in western Maharahstra in search of jobs as there weren’t any at home. Most of them were now working in Mumbai in a myriad of jobs including waiting tables and in the mailrooms of companies to running their own small businesses.

The men had gathered to attend a meeting organized by the Swades Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has been set up Walt Disney Co. India’s Managing Director Ronnie Screwvala, and which is run by his wife Zarina Mehta, the managing trustee of the nonprofit.

Swades, the men were told, was undertaking various initiatives in their or neighboring villages to help get access to water and sanitation, healthcare and education. Swades hopes that if these basic facilities are available in these villages, these migrants could be lured back to their villages to set up businesses locally or take up agriculture.

This is key to Mr. Screwvala’s plan to boost the economy of rural India.“If India is looking to become one of the top three economies globally, can we actually achieve that without the 600 million people who live in rural India,” said Mr. Screwvala, who co-founded UTV Software Communications Ltd. and sold it to Walt Disney last year. “Rural India lives in a different time warp and will continue to do so…. Unless we fix rural India, we can’t be a rocking economy.”

Mr. Screwvala’s plan is to provide, by December 2017, one million people with access to clean water and sanitation, education, healthcare services and better agricultural practices in the roughly 1,800 villages in the districts of Ratnagiri and Raigad in rural Maharashtra.

The plan requires about $120 million, half of which will be funded by him and his family, and the rest through donors, he says. Mr. Screwvala is one of a handful of Indians who are starting to open up their wallets for philanthropic causes. In 2011 Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Chief Executive Warren Buffett met with Indian business leaders in New Delhi to encourage them to join them in their effort to donate their wealth to charity. So far tycoon Azim Premji, the founder and chairman of Wipro Ltd, is the only one in India who has signed up to their Giving Pledge initiative. But philanthropy is a growing trend. In its annual India Philanthropy Report last year, consulting firm Bain & Co. Inc. found that India’s rich increased their contributions from 2.3% of household income in 2010 to 3.1% in 2011. Bain says its research has found that these philanthropists would likely increase their donations in the years ahead.

Thousands of villagers across the country move to big cities every year because there aren’t any proper health and education facilities in their villages, limited means of earning a living, no easy access to clean drinking water or sanitation.

The pattern followed by these villagers is the same as that of immigrants the world over—it’s usually the working age men who first go to the land of opportunity and once they find jobs, they start bringing over family members one at a time.

The trend is widely prevalent in the villages that Swades is currently working in. It’s common for many villages to have old people or wives and little children as their only residents as most of the men are in the cities of Mumbai and Pune, working mostly in a myriad of low skilled jobs, often living in pitiful conditions on their meager salaries.

Mr. Screwvala says most of the villagers would not leave if they lead comfortable lives and had opportunities for economic growth in their own backyards.

But instead of only handing out cash to lay a pipe to bring water to a village or build toilets in homes, Swades also works with different government agencies that often already have funds to address the needs and problems of the villagers but may not be aware of what is required.

Swades believes that once these basic requirements are met, then villagers can focus on building a local economy whether by setting up small businesses or by adopting smarter agricultural practices that would give them higher yields.

Mr. Screwvala says he came up with this focused plan after several years of philanthropy in Maharashtra. He set up his nonprofit foundation in 1990 and named it the Society to Heal, Aid, Restore, Educate. It started out by training mentally challenged young adults to recycle old newspapers and cloth pieces and convert them into items for like photo frames, pen stands, gift bags.

In the last decade it expanded into doing rainwater harvesting, building toilets in homes and training farmers how to plant a second crop to enhance their incomes. It changed its name to Swades last summer when it came up with this plan.

Swades is taking this message to the villages it works in as well as to the migrants in Mumbai through monthly town hall-style meetings that it hosts.

It’s not clear if Mr. Screwvala will succeed. So far a handful of migrants have gone back to their villages and taken up farming. For most, the bright lights of Mumbai are still a better option.  (Follow  Megha at India Real Time on Twitter @mbahree and @IndiaRealTime.)

Does access to improved sanitation reduce childhood diarrhea in rural India?

By Santosh Kumar and Sebastian Vollmer, Health Economics,  22, Issue 4, pages 410–427, April 2013     Article first published online: 22 MAR 2012 

ABSTRACT: Almost nine million children under 5 years of age die every year. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of under-five mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths is caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set District Level Household Survey 3 to quantify the impact of access to improved sanitation on diarrheal morbidity for children less than 5 years of age in India. Using propensity score matching, we find that access to improved sanitation reduces the risk of contracting diarrhea by 2.2 percentage points. There is considerable heterogeneity in the impacts of improved sanitation. We find statistically insignificant treatment effects for children in low or middle socioeconomic status households and for girls; however, boys and children in high socioeconomic status households experienced economically significant treatment effects. The magnitude of the treatment effect differs largely by hygiene behavior. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Asia’s first waterless toilet opens

People of Regullanka village set a precedence in personal hygiene, general cleanliness with ECOSAN toilet

• By P. Sujatha Varma, www.thehindu.com
• November 29th, 2012

 

Eco-friendly:Secretary of Arthika Samata andal, Gora, showing the compost procured from the cement chamber after opening of the toilet vault, at Regullanka village of Avanigadda mandal in Krishna district on Tuesday. —PHOTO: V. RAJU

Regullanka, a sleepy village nestled in the flood-prone island mandal of Avanigadda in Krishna district, has earned a rare distinction. For the first time in Asia, residents of the entire village have embraced an innovative, eco-friendly, waterless toilet – the ECOSAN toilet.

The village situated on the banks of River Krishna achieved a new level of personal hygiene and general cleanliness with an ECOSAN toilet.

Vijayawada-based NGO Arthik Samata Mandal (ASM) implemented this project to save the local women folk of the hardship of trekking a long distance to reach village outskirts to answer nature’s call. The project is sponsored by Switzerland-based Terre des Hommes (TDH).

“It took a long time to persuade the villagers and secure their nod for construction of the toilets with a promise that they will make use of them,” said ASM secretary Nau Gora.

“Hundred and odd families of Regullanka and its surrounding areas have a shallow water table and villagers often face water scarcity. The ECOSAN toilets are a safe bet for this region,” says Ms. Gora. It’s like killing two birds in one shot.

The excreta which is stored in a concrete chamber for six months and allowed to convert into compost, was being diverted to the fields as fertilizers, said Willy Bergogne, India Country Representative, of TDH.

He said that Regullanka had stood in the first in Asia to have implemented this project in the entire village.

Surrounded by a team of local officials, villagers and representatives of many other organisations, Mr. Bergogne and others opened the first ECOSAN toilet vault.

The near 100 kg of compost procured by breaking open the chamber was thin odourless powder. “Use this as manure in the farm and the difference will reflect in the output,” said Mr. Bergogne.

J. Satyapal Reddy, Superintending Engineer, RWS, Krishna district, complimented the ASM and the TDH for their achievement. Similar efforts by the government had failed to convince villagers in the past, he said.

• Vijayawada-based NGO Arthik Samata Mandal has implemented the project

• It took a long time to persuade villagers and secure their nod for ECOSAN toilet, says ASM secretary
  
  
• Body waste that is stored in a concrete chamber for six months and allowed to convert into compost is diverted to fields as fertilizer

Spotlight on sanitation for World Toilet Day

Epic Times,  UNESCO, Nov 18, 2012

Aid agencies and international groups are using this year's World Toilet Day to highlight the risks to women and children from poor sanitation.

Since 2001, November 19 has marked World Toilet Day, drawing attention to issues of toileting and sanitation worldwide. The United Nations says more than 2.7 million people die each year due to lack of sanitation, with almost 2,000 children dying each day from unsanitary conditions.

World Toilet Day

• More than 2.7 million people die each year due to lacking sanitation
• Most of those who die are under five years old.
• Each year, children miss a total of 272 million school days due to water-borne or sanitation-related diseases.
• Approximate 1.25 billion women and girls lack safe sanitation
• Only 1 in 3 people worldwide have access to suitable toilet facilities.
• More than 1 billion people still defecate in the open.
  
• In her latest report to the UN General Assembly, Catarina de Albuquerque, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, has called for the elimination of inequalities in access to water and sanitation.

She's told Radio Australia's Cconnect Asia program the problem extends beyond the right to sanitation, to other rights including health,education , work and the right to lead a life in dignity.

"It is a crisis that we are facing, and since sanitation is a taboo issue, it's something dirty that we want to hide, we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to talk about it," she said.

"So if we don't talk about and if we make a taboo around it, obviously it's very difficult for governments to prioritise it in their policy and address this problem."

It is a crisis that we are facing, and since sanitation is a taboo issue, it's something dirty that we want to hide, we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to talk about it.

Catarina de Albuquerque, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation. The United Nations says a lack of access to toilets remains an important source of global inequality, with poor sanitation almost exclusively a burden of the poor.

It says lacking sanitation not only made poor people sick; it also shrank their already limited possibilities by forcing them to stay away from school and work. Each year, children miss a total of 272 million school days due to water-borne or sanitation-related diseases.

"Each time I go on a mission for the UN, I always visit a school, and I always talk with the girls, and not having sanitation - not having girls' only toilets - means after they reach puberty, they don't go to school - especially if they have their period" she said. "And I met some girls who tell me they miss school for one week a month...so you see the dimensions of the tragedy."

Jane Caro from international NGO WaterAid has told Radio Australia's Pacific Beat program the aim of World Toilet Day is to bring the issue of sanitation out into the open.

"As long as we keep it hidden - partly because it's such a taboo, shameful kind of subject still, shamefully - there isn't the same kind of pressure to provide this kind of infrastructure as there is perhaps for other things," she said.

"I think it is that silence that has allowed this to go on, and avoid thinking about it, and avoid, therefore, actually raising awareness, increasing pressure...and generally just being more open about the issue, which is I think the first step towards doing something about it."

WaterAid says 1 in 3 women and girls do not have access to toilets, and unsafe or open toilets increase the risks of physical and sexual violence. Ms Caro says they've found World Toilet Day events such as 'Big Squat' flash mobs help to raise awareness of the dangers through humour. 

When I started...to think about what it would be like to be a woman in a village where there was no toilet - or only one - and where it was not only embarrassing to reveal my needs, but possibly dangerous? It made me think."

"There's an obvious way to get people to talk about it, and that is our tendency to have 'toilet humour' as part of the way we joke with one another," she said.

"I actually think using some humour...[makes] people think, because that's what it did for me when I started to know about this, was actually to think about what it would be like to be a woman in a village where there was no toilet - or only one - and where it was not only embarrassing to reveal my needs, but possibly dangerous. It made me think."

One organisation working on the ground in Papua New Guinea is A-T Projects, which uses local materials to develop toilets for schools and communities in in Goroka Province.

Director Miriam Layton says while some foreign aid helps in setting up proper sanitation, more needs to be done by the local and PNG governments to improve facilities.

She says she hopes the new female governor of Eastern Highlands province will help drive the push to improve sanitation needs for women. "In our urban centres, as well as rural centres, there is no proper facilities to cater for women's needs as well," she said.

"So when women come for business in town, or for markets as well, they face problems when looking for toilets, and that is when they are arrested and there's violence.

"At the moment we are still getting support from outside, no own government - so we need to do a lot more work to convince the Papua New Guinea government, as well as the donors, to do more in this area."