In India There’s More Cell Phones than Toilets

This is one of the big problems of aid management in India. A report released by the World Bank in 2010 said that the lack of toilets and proper sanitation in India costs a whopping $54 billion annually. The situation now seems to be no better. There are an estimated 450,000 deaths out of 575 million cases of diarrhea every year in India. Due to the lack of proper sanitation and facilities, millions of people in rural and urban areas resort to defecating in public, often along railroad tracks.

This creates long-term public health problems, of course, with illnesses that arise from diarrhea, malaria, trachoma and intestinal worms, but the lack of sanitation leads to the agonizing social situation for anyone’s dignity, especially for women. When so much is spent on programs related to education and empowerment of the poor, you’d hope that some more money would be directed toward having more sanitation facilities across the country, so people could feel empowered in little, but significant ways.

The journalist Adam Yamaguchi did a great profile on this, that he called The World’s Toilet Crisis, which you can check out here