A daunting task to achieve total sanitation in India by 2019 !
In a world in which 14 percent of the population in the 21st century still defecate outdoors, children remain among the most vulnerable to a lack of toilets, contamination from human waste and dirty water.
The young are suffering the brunt of a health and development crisis that has claimed the lives of at least 10 million children under the age of five since 2000 because they have no access to a basic toilet, according to a new report from the international development organization WaterAid.
The United Nations, which designated November 19 as World Toilet Day to highlight sanitation as a developmental priority, says about 35 percent -- 2.5 billion of the planet’s 7 billion people -- live without basic sanitation facilities such as toilets and latrines. That’s at a time when more people have mobile phones on Earth than a toilet. Globally, an estimated 1.8 billion drink fouled water that’s faecally contaminated, according to World Health Organization/UNICEF.
India accounts for about 60 percent of Earth’s residents without toilets, highest in the world, with human excrement that goes into a field polluting groundwater, crops and waterways, causing illnesses such as diarrhea and cholera.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a challenging task ahead in combating India's sanitation problem, one that costs India 600,000 lives annually from diarrhea. An estimated 1.1 million liters (290,000 gallons) of human excrement enters the Ganges River every minute, the revered waterway that Prime Minister has promised to clean.
Lack of toilets for vast majority of our population is also a major threat to our womenfolk living in the countryside. According to report, a third of country's women are vulnerable to the risk of rape or sexual assault, a danger that gained worldwide attention in May when two girls from a village in Uttar Pradesh were raped and hanged from a mango tree after they went outdoors to defecate.
India’s 50 percent open defecation rate in contrast trails a 3 percent rate in Bangladesh and 1 percent in China, according to a May report by WHO and Unicef.
One hopes India meets its target of total sanitation by 2019 coinciding with 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi as announced by our Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From the fringe side, it appears to be a daunting task and one can only hope that our government is able to enable country's 1.2 billion residents access to toilets by 2019.
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