Water

The Poverty News Blog comments on a news article from the Global Post and The Telegraph that brings us a shocking statistic from the United Nations: "Half of India's population has a mobile phone while only a third has access to a toilet." As the Poverty News Blog notes, the statistic suggests that India has a long way to go on public health. Saritha Rai, author of the Global Post article, notes that one major problem seems to be the application of power- and resource-intensive Western sanitation ideas to India, a country with much lower energy and water usage and much more simplified waste disposal management practices than the Western world. Beyond the resource considerations, there are also cultural ones: "In many parts of rural India, a toilet is not just about the infrastructure but about age-old traditions. A poverty-stricken family would rather build a house or a shop and rent it out rather than have a toilet. And then they would continue going out to the fields for their daily rituals." The YouTube video below explores India's sanitation crisis in more detail: