[bignaj]

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?

[ilaksh]

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.

[BrandonMarc]

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).

[bignaj]

>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.

[Elzair]

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