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“Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open?” With these words, the new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week pushed sanitation up the hierarchy of national concerns. Using the solemn speech in the annual commemoration of the Independence Day, Modi announced a new campaign to eliminate open defecation – the practice of people relieving themselves in the open – by 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth in 2019.
Approximately 160 million children under the age of 5 are stunted. This means they are failing to grow well and lack of height can be a marker of a whole range of developmental setbacks including cognitive impairment. The 2013 Lancet series on maternal and child nutrition confirmed that to reduce stunting we need three things: an enabling environment for political commitment; a scaled-up series of cost-effective nutrition interventions and robust underlying drivers (food security, empowered women and a supportive health environment).
The UNICEF and World Health Organisation Joint Monitoring - Programme 2012 report estimates 5 million Zambians live without access to safe water and 6.7 million lack access to improved sanitation (of which around 2.3 million practice open defecation). It is for this reason that Government working with various cooperating partners has embarked on innovative strategies such as the Three Million People Sanitation Programme among others to address this sad state of affairs.
Blog post by Kamal Kar, written after his recent visit to IDS.
Open defecation, the practice of defecating outside and in public as a result of lack of access to toilets and latrines has tremendous consequences on human health, dignity and security as well as the environment, social and economic development. It is reported that a child dies every 2 and a half minutes from diseases linked to open defecation. This practice needs to be stopped now in the interest of the country’s development.
In India, a long economic boom has done little to reduce the vast number of cases of malnutrition and stunting in children, leaving them with mental and physical deficits that affect them for the rest of their lives. An emerging body of scientific studies suggest that many of the 162 million children under the age of 5 in the world who are malnourished are suffering less a lack of food than poor sanitation.
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