All about India

Although in terms of sanitation, India has made significant progress since the 1980s, there is still much room for improvement. While it is true that 251 million Indians now have access to improved sanitation, 814 million (or 66% of the population) are still without improved sanitation. As of 2010, the country has not met the MDG for sanitation (UNICEF, N.A.).

Open defecation is still deemed as an acceptable rural practice, where over 50% of the population defecate in the open, leading to serious sanitation problems. In comparison, only 4% of China’s population and 7% of Bangladesh and Brazil’s population defecate in the open (UNICEF, N.A.). Not only in rural areas, due to the substantial population growth of urban areas, land and housing constraints have resulted in urban Indians living in congested slums with equally poor sanitation. This allows infectious diseases to spread easily, worsened by environmental conditions such as flooding, which creates the problem of spreading of water borne diseases. To learn more about flooding, click here. There is a lack of cures specifically targeted at diseases that affect individual communities, thus these diseases are not effectively being dealt with and are allowed to spread uncontrollably.