Nearly half of India’s 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home, but more people own a mobile phone, according to the latest census data.
Only 46.9% of the 246.6 million households have lavatories while 49.8% defecate in the open. The remaining 3.2% use public toilets. […]
About 77% of homes in the eastern state of Jharkhand have no toilet facilities, while the figure is 76.6% for Orissa and 75.8% in Bihar. All three are among India’s poorest states with huge populations which live on less than a dollar a day. In Jammu & Kashmir 8.9% of households still have their latrines emptied by manual scavengers.
“Open defecation continues to be a big concern for the country as almost half of the population do it,” Registrar General and Census Commissioner C Chandramouli said while releasing the latest data. […]
A union minister had recently said women in rural areas demand mobile phones, not toilets. This was vigorously denied by a 20-year-old tribal woman from Madhya Pradesh Anita Narre. “A toilet is more significant in the life of a woman than a mobile because the former gives them dignity”, she said. Anita Narre grabbed the international headlines at the beginning of the year when she was awarded for leading a “sanitation revolution”. Two days after her marriage in 2011 she left her in-laws house and refused to return until they had built a toilet.
Source: India census: more people have a mobile phone than a household toilet | Sanitation Updates
Address : http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/india-census-more-people-have-a-mobile-phone-than-a-household-toilet/
Date Visited: Thu Apr 05 2012 14:11:03 GMT+0200 (CEST)
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