Comment by hingisundhorsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hingisundhorsa | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about the actual conditions in North India. But this article contains some markers that are at best suggestive of exaggeration, at worst maybe falsification. Eg, high levels of descriptive details that don't seem to be relevant and also don't mesh together: 1. Sunita’s family in the north Indian village of Mukimpur

2. When nature calls, the 26-year-old single mother and her four children head toward the jungle next to their farm of red and pink roses, to a field of tall grass, flecked with petals, where the 7,000 people of her village go to defecate and exchange gossip.

7000 people is a lot of people. Especially for a village. A quick check shows Mukimpur in the 2011 census only has a population of either 42 or 151. http://ourhero.in/population/villages/mukimpur-111460 http://www.populationofindia.co.in/uttar-pradesh/muzaffarnag...

Taking a look in Maps: https://maps.google.com.my/maps?q=Mukimpur,+Uttar+Pradesh,+I...

Seems like there's maybe 100 structures there max, even if all were houses, how do you get 7000 people?

There definitely maybe a toilet problem, but I doubt this article is shedding light on the cause.

This article points to multiple causes: 1) cultural/social issues about where the proper place to defecate is 2) lack of education about germ theory and various fecal pathogens etc. 3) problems with bureaucracy converting money into action 4) lack of emphasis on the issue versus other issues 5) difficulty impacting the huge # of people living in India (problems of scale). These all seem pretty valid to me. I'm sure there are other causes as well and I'd like to learn more... what would you add?

Those aren't the real problems. The article is distracting from the real problem and now you are contributing to that.

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.

>The problem is that resources are not being allocated fairly. One of the main things that sustains that lack of equality is racism.

I see how lack of plumbing/sewage/running water is a major issue (thank you for adding that) but I was put off by you pulling the race card without substantiating it at all. Unless you can provide some evidence, racism does not seem to be the issue here -- lack of plumbing is the issue.

Saying that a country is a "developing nation" or slamming a culture or talking about lack of eduction or talking about population, these are all the same types of racist things that British colonialists have used to disparage India or other countries for hundreds of years.

Even "developing nation" is a racist term used to cover up extreme inequality to the point of repression where the rich white countries hoard fuel and control and then point at brown people and say they are inferior and just haven't caught up yet. Where the reality is that those countries have advanced civilizations going back thousands of years and just aren't being allowed their fair share of the resources and so cannot "develop" every part of their country.

Or more generally, not even specifically British people or white people or any group, this is on a spectrum with classism. And its the same issue -- unfair distribution of resources is excused by pointing at the resulting situation and implying that the people have inferior qualities that cause the situation.

I don't see how "developing nation" implies that these people have inferior qualities. It implies that these people are progressing faster than "developed nations", though they are for the moment still poor. You could call it classism, because it recognizes a wealth disparity, but I don't see how you can distribute resources more "fairly" without recognizing wealth disparity.

I wish I had mod points to give you. I also got taken in by that article. This makes a lot more sense now.

There is something similar to racism going on, and the article does mention it: the social caste system, in which it is considered taboo to adopt behaviors of the untouchables, even if such behaviors may be beneficial to avoid cholera.

It's all about prioritizing. Creating a bunch of port-a-potties is a cheaper, and more possible, short-term solution than upgrading the water infrastructure for a country of a billion people. Yes, I said billion, because yes, that is a factor. Ignoring it won't make it easier.

I'll agree, putting a port-a-potty inside my apartment isn't a great solution ... but now we're arguing placement, not the validity of using it instead of an open field.

As for cleaning out the port-a-potties ... if the Indian government who's installing these things isn't allocating some funding or encouragement to cleaning and maintaining, then that's another resource-allocation problem. Here again, we're discussing a bad (or at least, imperfect) implementation of the goal, not the validity of the goal itself.

It's also worth noting that in a sense it's not even upgrading water infrastructure - if a large region has next to no waterworks to begin with, that makes this even more difficult.

Lastly, just because it doesn't look like Western sanitation, doesn't mean it's not a better temporary solution. I would even suggest that for an area with very little water infrastructure to begin with, it may be too much to expect them to go straight to a system like you'd see in Berlin (or, I'm guessing, New Delhi).

Your argument is correct, but you seem to place quite a lot of trust in Census numbers. As someone who has seen some of the actual Census surveys out in the country, that is rather amusing. Making population numbers up, or roughly estimating them is quite common.

Now your structures argument makes sense, so I'm guessing this is more like 600-700 people (most Indian families live in large joint households, so 6 people a house is not uncommon).

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