It's Sunday NightSpeaking of defecation:
June 17, 2014
By Shannti Dinnoo
It's early morning (click here) and local commuters are queuing up for tickets at the Kirti Nagar railway station in the Indian capital, Delhi.Along the tracks, another crowd is gathering - each person on his own, separated by a modest distance. They are among the 48% of Indians who do not have access to proper sanitation.
Coming from a slum close-by, they squat among the few trees and bushes along the railway tracks and defecate in the open.
To many, this is a daily morning ritual despite the hazards of contracting diseases such as diarrhoea and hepatitis.
It can be even more hazardous for women since each time a woman uses the outdoors to relieve herself, she faces a danger of sexual assault.
Recently two teenage girls from the state of Uttar Pradesh were gang-raped and found hanging from a tree after they left their village home to go to the toilet. Their house, like hundreds of millions of others in the country, did not have any facilities....
May 9, 2017
By Gaurav
One billion people (click here) worldwide still practice “open defecation.” India alone has an estimated 600 million people defecating openly, according to a study by the United Nations, accounting for more open defecation than any other country in the world. According to Bruce Gordon, acting coordinator for Sanitation and Health at the World Health Organization, open defecation results in the spread of a number of diseases, including cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis A, and typhoid.
In a blog post titled, “India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste,” Bill Gates recently commended Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for launching the “Clean India” campaign, which aims to end open defecation by October 2, 2019 and install 75 million toilets across the country.
Gates does not know the reality on the ground in India. Indian bureaucrats, with the connivance of local politicians, are lining their pockets under this scheme by building unusable or event non-existent toilets....
