“Sanitation is more important than independence” Mahatma Gandhi

The students of Modern School ,Barakhamba Road,New Delh under the Vinod Dikshit Foundation have launched a campaign against the issue of open defecation and to support clean Sanitation practices.

•  Only 20% of urban population in India has access to flush toilets, connected to a sewerage system.

•  Only 4% have water toilets connected to septic tanks

•  33% have bucket latrines

•  33% have no access to any kind of toilet facility

•  In rural India , nearly 89% of the population or about 750 million people which is more than the population of Europe defecate in the open and expose themselves to various diseases, nudity and humiliation

 

•  According to the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence and the Ministry of Health and Family welfare report of 2005-“An estimate 18 crore people and Rs 1,200 crore are lost annually due to sanitation related diseases in India

.•  India is faced with the formidable task of handling 900 million liters of urine and 135 million kg of faceal matter per day with a totally inadequate system of collection and disposal

•  Low sanitation coverage in India is primarily due to insufficient awareness of people and the lack of affordable sanitation technology.

 

•  135 million people in India have no access to basic health facilities , 226 million have no access to safe drinking water and over 100 million lack basic sanitation practice(UNDP report,1998)

•  80% of the population has been covered under safe drinking water program but water borne diseases have not come down for want of sanitation

•  The stinking unclean garbage heaps, a large number of people defecating in the open or urinating up the walls indicate bad health of the people living in a decaying society.

•  People in the villages consider defecating in the open a healthy practice. A common misconception in villages is that toilets are an urban necessity because there is not much space available for defecating in the open.

•  According to WHO , every year about 8 million new cases of tuberculosis are added globally with India alone contributing 1.2 million . 5% of our population carries the Hepatitis B virus which causes jaundice, a potentially fatal disease if left untreated and annually about 2% of people are infected with malaria, thanks to poor sanitation facility