India’s Toilet Race Failing as Villages Don’t Use Them

The problem is that there is no plumbing and sewage in many areas and no resources to build it. There is no running water. The budget that the local government has is say 100 units. Installing a sewage system costs 1000 units. Installing running water for the whole village costs 3000 units. Its just not going to happen.

The problem is that resources are not being allocated fairly. One of the main things that sustains that lack of equality is racism. Racism is a huge problem, even here in this thread. It is often disguised as a disparagement for "lack of education" or "cultural issues" or "population".

These are not toilets like we think of toilets. These are porcelain Port-a-Potties. A very small septic tank directly underneath the toilet which has no water to clean it and must have the feces scraped out by hand.

Would you really consider that to be sanitary? To have a Port-A-Potty installed in your studio apartment? There is no running water in the house or neighborhood. There is no truck to come pick up the Port-A-Potty. Actually its buried in the ground. Someone is going to have to lean in and scrape the feces out.

Or, since there is 4 acre open field about 1/8 of a mile away which is often downwind, people who can walk should go take their shit over there, rather than leaving it in the house, where we will have to smell it all the time.

Amen. That's this "story" in a nutshell.

> ....Is there some intersection of requirements and desires that might make everybody happy?

These are excellent questions, but I think no one is asking them. Agencies like UNICEF are busy funding ridiculous and patronizing campaigns like this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU). As a result, the Government is running hell for leather trying to get some toilets built, and "educating" people to use them, instead of asking "What problems do you have?".

Hopefully, some of the solutions I suggested, or alternatives, might strike some of the planning officials. Otherwise this is going to be a largely symbolic and useless gesture.

Yep, toilets like this in every house would probably work too. If the Government paid for them, or gave financial assistance and strongly encouraged households to build them. These probably would not work for a common toilet (which is the model discussed in the article), unless you had a really deep hole.

Also, the soil problems you mentioned come into play, because the monsoons bring down a huge amount of water. (That's the reason those things are usually built out of concrete.) I think the warm weather still might be factor, whereas it is probably not in Eastern Europe, where it is colder, and consequently slower decomposition and fewer flies.

It's a fairly hard design and engineering problem to solve if you look at these constraints. Unfortunately, these often take a back seat to rhetoric and quasi-shaming news headlines like this one. UNICEF (a UN agency) also does this, apparently without trying to understand these constraints, and throws money into ridiculous "education" campaigns to shame people into pooping in a smelly, constricted area with a ton of flies. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/20/world/asia/unicef-latest-anti-...)

As a result, the Government has tried to tackle it head-on without proper planning and design, and will end up constructing thousands of these toilets which no one will use.

While we had flush toilets and running water, there wasn't a public sewer system, everything ran into a large septic tank in the backyard. We had to call a guy to come out every few years to pump it out.

Several of my neighbors, while they had running water, didn't have toilets indoors. Their homes having been built basically by hand by the owners. They were decent enough homes, but if you had to go, you went out to their outhouse in the backyard, which was basically a deep hole in the ground over which was a wooden frame you could sit on. While they had toilet paper to clean up with afterwords, they were simply too poor to move the toilet indoors. Most of these same neighbors got most of their protein supply for the year during deer season or fishing in local farmer's ponds.

It also wasn't uncommon for my and my friends, while off playing around in the woods or out in a farmer's field to just find a secluded spot and do our business there.

Most of this wasn't a surprise to my father, who grew up in an area and a time where outhouses like this were perfectly normal for everybody and cleaning up afterwards usually involved tearing pages out from the Sears catalog or using dried out corn cobs.

For my mother, who grew up later and in a Rust Belt city, it practically terrorized her.

The plus is having a home in such a place ensures you always get water, even if half the lane up the road doesn't get it.

It's easy to have problems making pharmaceuticals. It's bad enough in the USA, I'm sure its worse in third world countries. E.g. here's something that an FDA report said [1]:

   Microbial contamination is a risk to biologic product
   quality and safety. The cost of inadequate microbial
   control in biologic product manufacture is enormous
   as facilities or bioreactor production trains may
   have to be shut down for lengthy periods of time
   ...
   The recent cases of bacterial contamination of
   biologic products suggest that preventative
   maintenance plans ... need further attention.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/CentersOffices/CDER/UC...

Yes, such a travesty did and worse in some places exists still. However, when the practice of relieving oneself in an area designated for that purpose outside the village for public in general, there was no one cleaning it up, it was left to nature. Ironicaly, The job of toilet cleaning started to exist only when the toilets moved closer and closer to home.

No, we still do not clean up after us and even today whether we like it or not there are still people in all countries throughout the world who are engaged in the waste disposal industry. Guys who collect garbage at your home every morning, still don't really enjoy it whether they come walking, on tri-cycle or in a ultra modern garbage truck and it is the practice in the best of societies today. Collecting decomposing organic waste of any nature is bad experience for anyone.

For Yersinia pestis (the black death) public sanitation is not a factor... Waste management also often wasn't as bad as people imagine today, the stories of the worst, not average sanitations are what are most commonly related about the past (why, shock value of course).

Nor is there need to go so far back in time. The British were in such poor health that 40% of their military volunteers for the Boer War and the First World War were unfit, in part because of malnutrition and diet deficiencies like rickets. Much of this was due to poverty, and a belief by the rich in laissez-faire capitalism, where issues like clean water, working sewage, and uncontaminated foods were something best left to the markets, not the government.

Much of the gains were seem to have been through social democracy in one form or other, with at least government oversight if not outright control of water, food, health services, etc. It probably helps they haven't continued their long held tradition of invading each other every generation or so. I can't say though I'm fond of the 'sacrifice' that is the White Man's Burden, or the hard work that is conquering and ruling other countries.

Personally, I think Japan and (South) Korea also have impressive rags-to-riches stories, especially considering Japanese seclusion until the mid-1800s. (Japan of course modeling itself on Imperial Germany, and hoping to keep itself out of the the hands Western imperialism, as befell China and India.)

Of course, it's also possible to rank "riches" by GDP, in which case Qatar is the clear winner, since it became a high income economy only since the 1950s.

It wasn't all that uncommon (and may still be in some places) for people to use a removable catch in their outhouses so they can remove it and use it for fertilizer. I don't know about India, but I've seen traditional systems like this in various parts of Asia.

I wouldn't recommend it today now that we know about germs and things. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if people defecated in their crop fields with some regularity since it's good for the plants.