Facts About Sanitation In India

India is probably the only country where ancestral generations had a better sanitization system than the present. The Indus Valley civilization had a unique system of underground drainage. The main sewer was 1.5 meters deep and 91 cm across and connected to many north-south and east-west sewers. They made it of bricks smoothened and blended seamlessly.

But today, India is one of the many developing countries struggling to provide universal access to safe sanitation for years. Elimination of open defecation and improving solid waste management is one of the focuses of programmes working for sanitation in India.

• The Ganges is one of the most popular and pious rivers in India. It’s also one of the most polluted rivers, as most of the cities directly inject over three-quarters of untreated sewage into the river.
• Communicable waterborne diseases and open defecation are the chief concerns in India. They lead to the reason India has such a high child mortality rate.
• Shortage of sufficient and appropriate toilets leads to open defecation in India. Earlier, only 32.7 percent of rural houses had access to toilets, which grew to 98.8 percent as over 100 million newly constructed toilets cover most of the rural region after the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign.
• According to the studies, some people in rural households prefer open defecation as they believe it is more pleasurable and desirable compared to the use of toilets.
• According to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, India had 45 times more people defecating in the open than China, which was 626 million Indians and 14 million Chinese.
• According to the World Bank, in 2006, India was spending more money for not having toilets than the gross state domestic product (GSDP) of Tamil Nadu and Gujarat in 2006–07.
• India’s telecom sector performs better than the heavily regulated housing sector, as the number of mobile users is much higher than the toilet.

These facts may sound funny but, India’s sanitisation quality and facilities need a lot to improve in the coming days. And the government has pledged to make India a better state of health and sanitisation.