According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2012, approximately 626 million people in India defecated in the open, compared with only 14 million people in China. The problem was so bad that India’s minister of rural development, Jairam Ramesh, speaking at a luncheon launching a new “eco-lavatory,” was forced to admit: “Nearly 60 percent of the people in the world who defecate in the open belong to India. Even countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan have better records. We should be ashamed of this.”
To rectify the poor hygiene and sanitation problems that have beset the population, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has created a program that will actually track the use of toilets in rural areas of India. Usage will be tracked online by “sanitation inspectors.”
Starting next month, the teams of hygiene checkers will go out into the rural areas with their mobile phones, tablets and iPads to report in real time if toilets are really being used. “Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained,” the government said in a statement on Wednesday.
Modi is said to have raised the ire of some government officials in October of 2014 when he required them to come in to work on a national holiday to clean toilets. He then promised he would spend the next five years fixing the problem. Modi has had the government double its spending on a toilet building program and even gone so far as to ask large corporations for financial donations for the project.
The lack of sanitation and toilet facilities in India costs the government over $50 billion annually from early deaths and diseases. Poor sanitation is a major contributor to water-borne diseases, which have killed 4.5 million children worldwide over the last three years. The average cost to build the toilets comes to about $300 a piece, and that includes materials and labor.
The government contends the rewards far outweigh the minimal cost of the toilet facilities in not only saving lives, but in bringing a poverty-stricken population into a better world. Improving sanitation is “an economic and humanitarian opportunity of historic proportions,” the government said in a statement.
