India will not reach its Millennium Development Goal on sanitation before 2047, while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will not achieve the target before 2028, according to a United Nations report released on the eve of World Toilet Day 2011.
The WaterAid report titled "Off-track, off-target: Why investment in water, sanitation and hygiene is not reaching those who need it most" says that 818 million Indians and 98 million Pakistanis lack access to toilets. It also reports that 148 million Indians and 18 million Pakistanis do not have adequate access to safe drinking water.
The five countries with the largest absolute numbers of people without sanitation India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan are all middle income and account for over 1.7 billion people without sanitation.
The report points out that the budgets allocated for water and sanitation improvements in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have been extremely low. Public spending on water and sanitation accounts for 0.45% of gdp in India and only 0.20% of gdp in Pakistan. Some of the shortfall has been made up by official development assistance, particularly for India which has been among the top aid recipients every year since 2000. However, a recent report from the Comptroller and Auditor General in India identified US$2 billion of unspent aid money in 2010. Although detail has not been available beyond a reference to weak planning, the India case study confirms that financial absorption is a problem that has affected the Total Sanitation Campaign in certain states. In Uttar Pradesh, only 63% of the funds released were used in 2005-06, although that improved to 83% in 2006-07. Findings from Chhattisgarh highlight the slow release and use of centrally available funding, with over half of the 16 districts experiencing delays in opting for the second installment. The research shows that the reasons for the low utilization include: states unable to match central government grants, deficiencies in the process of decentralized planning, shortages or short tenure of key staff, delay in the flow of funds, as well as multiple reporting requirements.
Earlier in October this year, India's rural development minister Jairam Ramesh said his nation's rivers have been turned into open sewers by 638 million Indians without access to toilets. He was reacting a UNICEF report that said Indians make up 58% of the world population which still practices open defection, and the sense of public hygiene in India is the worst in South Asia and the world.
WaterAid calls the current hygiene situation a "global crisis" and cites the following statistics:
I. 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in eight of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)
II. 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost two fifths of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)
III. 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation - 4,000 child deaths a day or one child every 20 seconds. This equates to 160 infant school classrooms lost every single day to an entirely preventable public health crisis. (WHO/WaterAid)
Solving this serious problem in developing nations is not going to be easy. It can not be done by simply replicating the western toilet for the vast majority of the poor in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. It will require creative thinking.
One example of creative thinking is Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh International in India. He has developed a simple, low-cost toilet which costs approximately Rs. 700 and could be installed anywhere, including villages without any plumbing. This toilet uses only 1.5 liters of water for flushing as against 10 liters by a conventional toilet. The toilet system consists of two pits: when the first one fills up, it is closed and the other one is used. The closed toilet dries up in two years when it is ready to be used as fertilizer and for conversion into biogas for heating, cooking, and generating electricity.
Another example is Dr. M. Sohail Khan, a professor from Pakistan currently working at UK's Loughborough University, who has received a grant from Gates Foundation. He and his research team are developing a toilet that produces biological charcoal,minerals, and clean water to transform feces into a highly energetic combustible through a process combining hydrothermal carbonization of fecal sludge followed by combustion. The process will be powered by the heat generated during the combustion phase and will recover water and salt from feces and urine.
Gates Foundation is funding research grants under "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" program to develop a low-cost, no-flush toilet for the masses. In an interview on Public Radio, Dr. Frank Rijsberman of Gates Foundation explained it as follows: "We are asking people to come up with a toilet that does not flush, you know, clean water down an expensive set of pipes to get into a waste water treatment plant where we're spending even more energy and money to get that waste out again. We'd love for people to have what we sometimes call the cell phone of sanitation, an aspirational product that actually recovers resources from waste. There's a lot of energy in human waste. There is nutrients there, and we'd love to find a way to reuse those directly without relying on flushing your waste down the drain with clean drinking water."
I believe that the key to eventually solving the sanitation crisis in the developing world lies in the success of research and development efforts sponsored by organizations like Gates Foundation and Sulabh International.
Haq's Musings: India & Pakistan Off-Track, Off-Target on Toilets
The WaterAid report titled "Off-track, off-target: Why investment in water, sanitation and hygiene is not reaching those who need it most" says that 818 million Indians and 98 million Pakistanis lack access to toilets. It also reports that 148 million Indians and 18 million Pakistanis do not have adequate access to safe drinking water.
The five countries with the largest absolute numbers of people without sanitation India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan are all middle income and account for over 1.7 billion people without sanitation.
The report points out that the budgets allocated for water and sanitation improvements in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have been extremely low. Public spending on water and sanitation accounts for 0.45% of gdp in India and only 0.20% of gdp in Pakistan. Some of the shortfall has been made up by official development assistance, particularly for India which has been among the top aid recipients every year since 2000. However, a recent report from the Comptroller and Auditor General in India identified US$2 billion of unspent aid money in 2010. Although detail has not been available beyond a reference to weak planning, the India case study confirms that financial absorption is a problem that has affected the Total Sanitation Campaign in certain states. In Uttar Pradesh, only 63% of the funds released were used in 2005-06, although that improved to 83% in 2006-07. Findings from Chhattisgarh highlight the slow release and use of centrally available funding, with over half of the 16 districts experiencing delays in opting for the second installment. The research shows that the reasons for the low utilization include: states unable to match central government grants, deficiencies in the process of decentralized planning, shortages or short tenure of key staff, delay in the flow of funds, as well as multiple reporting requirements.
Earlier in October this year, India's rural development minister Jairam Ramesh said his nation's rivers have been turned into open sewers by 638 million Indians without access to toilets. He was reacting a UNICEF report that said Indians make up 58% of the world population which still practices open defection, and the sense of public hygiene in India is the worst in South Asia and the world.
WaterAid calls the current hygiene situation a "global crisis" and cites the following statistics:
I. 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in eight of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)
II. 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost two fifths of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)
III. 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation - 4,000 child deaths a day or one child every 20 seconds. This equates to 160 infant school classrooms lost every single day to an entirely preventable public health crisis. (WHO/WaterAid)
Solving this serious problem in developing nations is not going to be easy. It can not be done by simply replicating the western toilet for the vast majority of the poor in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. It will require creative thinking.
One example of creative thinking is Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh International in India. He has developed a simple, low-cost toilet which costs approximately Rs. 700 and could be installed anywhere, including villages without any plumbing. This toilet uses only 1.5 liters of water for flushing as against 10 liters by a conventional toilet. The toilet system consists of two pits: when the first one fills up, it is closed and the other one is used. The closed toilet dries up in two years when it is ready to be used as fertilizer and for conversion into biogas for heating, cooking, and generating electricity.
Another example is Dr. M. Sohail Khan, a professor from Pakistan currently working at UK's Loughborough University, who has received a grant from Gates Foundation. He and his research team are developing a toilet that produces biological charcoal,minerals, and clean water to transform feces into a highly energetic combustible through a process combining hydrothermal carbonization of fecal sludge followed by combustion. The process will be powered by the heat generated during the combustion phase and will recover water and salt from feces and urine.
Gates Foundation is funding research grants under "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" program to develop a low-cost, no-flush toilet for the masses. In an interview on Public Radio, Dr. Frank Rijsberman of Gates Foundation explained it as follows: "We are asking people to come up with a toilet that does not flush, you know, clean water down an expensive set of pipes to get into a waste water treatment plant where we're spending even more energy and money to get that waste out again. We'd love for people to have what we sometimes call the cell phone of sanitation, an aspirational product that actually recovers resources from waste. There's a lot of energy in human waste. There is nutrients there, and we'd love to find a way to reuse those directly without relying on flushing your waste down the drain with clean drinking water."
I believe that the key to eventually solving the sanitation crisis in the developing world lies in the success of research and development efforts sponsored by organizations like Gates Foundation and Sulabh International.
Haq's Musings: India & Pakistan Off-Track, Off-Target on Toilets
@ rules.
wow he is the only person can make Pakistan super power in only one day. Why he always swim opposite to River flow.
