India’s shortage of toilets costs the country more
than $50 billion a year, mostly through premature deaths and hygiene-related
diseases, according to a World Bank study.
The news among others prompted Prime Minister
Narendra Modi to launch a nationwide online programme to check whether people
are using toilets as part of his cleanliness drive.
From January 2015, officials will head out with
mobile phones, tablets and iPads to report on whether toilets are being used in
rural India, with results uploaded onto a website in real time.
Since taking office in May, Modi has repeatedly
lamented the poor state of sanitation and public cleanliness in India, vowing
to solve the problems within the next five years.
The government has doubled spending on a toilet
building programme and requested financial donations from some of the country’s
largest companies to help.
“Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the
construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be
ascertained,” the government said in a statement .In October, Modi annoyed
government officials by ordering them to come to work to clean toilets on a
national holiday.
About 626 million Indians defecate in the open
compared with 14 million in China, the World Health Organization said in a report.
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