New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made sanitation a priority for India. In his first independence day speech at Red Fort, he had said that he would rather build toilets than temples .
The government has set a goal to build toilet at every home by 2019.
But India faces an uphill task as half of Indian population still defecates in the open.
According to a report by international non-profit organisation WaterAid, “If all the people waiting for household toilets in India were to stand in a line now, the queue would stretch from earth to moon and maybe beyond as no less than 774 million people would be part of it.
The report also says that queue would need more than 5,892 years to get cleared assuming that each Indian needs about four minutes in a toilet
More than 140,000 children younger than five years die each year in India from diarrhea. Nearly 40 per cent of India's children are stunted; this will affect both their life chances and the future prosperity of India," the report says.
Infact, India lags behind nations like Nepal, Togo and Benin, which are much smaller in size and population, they have lesser number of people defecating in the open per square kilometers.
According to a UN report, more than 53 percent of Indian homes — about 70 percent in the villages — lack toilets. Poor sanitation and contaminated water cause 80 percent of the diseases afflicting rural India, and diarrhea is a leading killer of children younger than 5.
Poor sanitation increases the risk of disease and malnutrition, especially for women and children. Women and girls risk rape and abuse, because they have no toilet that offers privacy.
Last year, government built more than 5.8 million toilets — up from 4.9 million the previous year.
India's commitment to provide housel holf toilet will help in halting the contamination of groundwater that causes illnesses such as diarrhoea and cholera, costing the nation about $54 billion a year, according to the United Nation's Children's Fund.
Modi's “Clean India” campaign includes a pledge to build 50 million toilets by the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth in 2019.
One of the major challenges in India is not just to build more toilets but to change the attitudes of people towards using them. According to officials, building toilets is the easy part but getting people to use them is the real challenge.
