Kochi: With the breakneck speed of expansion of cities, India has the greatest number of urban-dwellers in the world without safe, private toilets and practising open defecation though the government has made sanitation a priority, a report by a global NGO says.
“India ranks top for having the greatest number of urbanites living without a safe, private toilet 157 million as well as the most urban dwellers practising open defecation 41 million,” the report by WaterAid, a UK-based charity working in the field of safe water and sanitation, says.
The second annual analysis of world’s toilets ‘Overflowing Cities The State of the World’s Toilets 2016’, released on the eve of World Toilet Day being observed tomorrow this year, also says the high population density of urban areas means that diseases spread fast in the absence of good sanitation.
The report says the problem was so big that the daily waste produced on the streets of India’s towns and cities was enough to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools, or 16 jumbo jets with poo every day.
Noting that the country was going through the largest rural-to-urban migration of this century, it says Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign recognises the country’s health and wealth largely depends on towns and cities growing in a sustainable, equitable way.
