I visited some slums in Delhi in order to assess the availability and condition of sanitation facilities for a volunteer program. And ‘deplorable’ is the word.
The slums I visited were notified slums and had been provided community bathrooms and toilets by the Government. Some of these were in an unusable condition, effectively amounting to no access. By far the worst was the ‘Sonia Gandhi Camp’ at RK Puram, where the outlet pipes of the toilets were broken resulting in a stinking muck all around. The slum habitants waited for nightfall to defecate by the roadside, in the open. All slums had a government/NGO cleaner and mostly, the worker was irregular.More details on the visits can be found at: What's that Smell?
A UNICEF survey conducted in 2009 estimates that 1.2 billion across the world defecate openly. Of these, the largest number is of Indians: 665 million defecate openly.
Graph: Distribution by country of people defecating openly
Country; Population defecating openly; Population defecating openly in the country as percent of total world population defecating openly
Source: UNICEF
Poor sanitation has adverse health implications: deaths, productivity loss due to sickness, increased public health care costs. According to WHO, in 2008, 13% of child mortality under age of 13 was due to diarrhoea. Indeed there is significant economic cost of the productivity loss. Water and Sanitation Program estimates the loss in income at USD 54 billion, about 6.4% of India’s GDP: http://www.wsp.org/wsp/node/1150
