700 m mobile users, but only 366 m Indians have toilet access

New Delhi, Nov 21 (PTI) There are 700 million cellphone
connections in India but only half this number of
Indians have access to private toilets.
The UN figures show the poor focus the country has on
the most important measure to prevent communicable diseases,
says Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh sanitation movement.
According to the figures, only 366 million Indians have
access to a private toilet or latrine, implying that everyday
650 million people or about 50 per cent of the population
resort to open defecation.
"The sanitation campaign rolled out at the end of the
last decade has accelerated the sanitation coverage in recent
years but only 26 per cent of the rural population has access
to sanitary latrines even today," says Pathak.
Unsafe drinking water and its contamination with fecal
matter is a major cause of diseases and child deaths in India,
a country that according to Forbes has as many as 69
billionaires.
The proportion of households without any toilet facility
declined from about 70 per cent in 1992-93 to about 51 per
cent in 2007-08, but the progress is deemed too slow by some.
Adequate sanitation facilities are key to controlling
communicable diseases, but unfortunately this has never been a
policy priority in India, Pathak said in a function to mark
the World Toilet Day on Friday.
The rural-urban divide too is sharp in the area. While 19
per cent of urban households are without toilet facilities,
the figure is as high as 66 per cent in case of rural
households.
Bihar, Jharkhand and Chahattisgarh have the lowest
figures for access to toilets, according to the Millennium
Development Goals' India report, while Kerala, Delhi,
Lakshadweep and Mizoram, have the highest figures. PTI