ET : Digital divide or toilet divide? : Nov 4,2007
Poor sanitation and lack of access to toilets impacts every one of us. Yet there is complete apathy to the issue
Mythili BhusnurmathOVER the past three days the capital played host to the annual summit of the WTO. The venue was the India Habitat Centre in the heart of the capital. But there were no anti-globalisers with banners and loudspeakers protesting on the streets leading to the venue, nor was there any of the usual security hype associated with WTO events and no, there was hardly any mention of it in the media. While print media did carry some reports, it was almost completely ignored by the electronic media.
A WTO summit, and under-played? That doesn’t quite gel. Agreed the WTO is all but dead, whatever Kamal Nath or Lamy might say from time to time. But even so, it is strange to say the least. There has to be another explanation. And there is! The annual summit is not of the highprofile World Trade Organisation but of the unsung, certainly un-glamorous, World Toilet Organisation. Given our socio-cultural values and prudery and hypocrisy when it comes to things like toilets, is it any wonder the event got so little prominence?
But just think about it. What is the true measure of a country’s development? Is it a sizzling stock market that breaches new barriers day after day, a 9% plus GDP growth, malls bursting with the good things in life, college grads getting sixdigit salaries? Or is it as the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it when ‘everyone of us gets a toilet to use’?
If it is the former, we are almost there. But if it is the latter, we are so far from there that we ought to hang our heads in shame. On the one hand we bask in the glory of becoming the second largest economy in the world, ahead of the US, by 2030, if the Goldman Sachs’ BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) report is to be believed. On the other, we just gloss over the reality that it will be another 200 years before every Indian gets access to a toilet, going by our track record.
And what is the reality? The reality is that more than 60 years after independence, 63% of households do not have access to a toilet. The position is worse in rural areas where close to 80% do not have access. Take a train ride through the countryside and the ubiquitous sight every morning is the row of bare bottoms lining the railway track.
For the vast majority of our rural folk, defecation in open spaces is the norm rather the exception; they have no choice. It’s much worse for women and young girls who are forced to go out under cover of darkness and in the process, run the risk of being molested.
In urban areas the position is better – 26% of the population does not have access to a toilet – but even here, over-crowding and poor sanitation are rife, with the attendant risk of disease. Apart from the loss of basic human dignity, not only for those who are forced to use open spaces, but also for human scavengers who clean dry toilets, unsanitary conditions are responsible for the spread of diseases like typhoid, cholera and diarrhoea. Of the 1.8 million infants who die of diarrhea every year in the world, 450,000 are Indian. Our infant mortality rates are among the highest in the world with many of the deaths due to entirely preventable diseases like diarrhoea.
The problem is that so far the issue has been seen as something affecting only the poor and lower income classes and hence has not been a priority area. But that is a myopic view. It’s not only the poor who suffer the consequences of poor sanitation. As more and more people use the riverside in lieu of toilets, drinking water sources are getting increasingly polluted. Even if people think they can tackle this by drinking bottled water, the stench will soon make many of our cities unlivable.
Much as the western world has realised it can no longer be indifferent to pollution in developing countries because the environment affects us all, regardless of where we are on the globe, it is only a matter of time before the better-off sections of Indian society realise that poor sanitation affects every one of us, regardless of income bracket or place of residence. Do we need to wait till then? Unfortunately, skewed priorities have meant there is much greater debate about the digital divide than about the toilet divide. We need to fix the latter first before we even think about the former.
mythili.bhusnurmath@timesgroup.com
Publication:Economic Times Mumbai; Date:Nov 4, 2007; Section:Economy; Page Number:7