Unclean India: Pak way ahead on sanitation

A UNICEF report card on sanitation facilities in South Asia has placed Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka above India., reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 18, 2008, 02:24:39 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A UNICEF report card on sanitation facilities in South Asia has placed Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka above India.

Between 1990 and 2006, about 40 per cent of people in Pakistan gained access to sanitation facilities as compared to just 20 per cent in India.

The comparative data was released by the United Nations Children’s Fund on the eve of the third South Asian conference on sanitation to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday.

William (Bill) Fellows, regional UNICEF advisor, attributed Pakistan’s better showing on lesser number of people opting for open defecation. “There can be something in Pakistan’s culture that restricts open defecation, which is not found in India,” he said.

In Pakistan just 31 per cent of people defecate in open as compared to 58 per cent in India, the UNICEF report said.

But, Lizette Burgers, UNICEF’s sanitation advisor, blamed India’s huge population growth and low starting base, as major reasons for the country’s poor standing in the region.

“Every year 10.9 million new people in rural India start using toilets. But, the growing population is out placing the government’s effort in providing sanitation facilities to the citizens,” she said.

UNICEF, however, said in the last two years India has made steady progress in providing access to sanitation with an annual rate of improvement being 22 per cent.

India is a major contributor for South Asia being the worst region in the world in providing sanitation. “About 2.5 billion people in South Asia — 64 per cent of the population — don’t have clean sanitation facilities, worst record for any region in the world,” said Therese Dooley, senior advisor at UNICEF’s water division in New York.

This is despite 502 million more people using improved facilities, which has doubled since 1990, but is still short of meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goal by 2015.

Dr SK Singh of NGO WaterAid blamed lack of political will for the region’s poor record. “Politicians are not interested because providing improved sanitation does not convert into votes. Unless they act, things are not doing to change fast.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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