Alarmist report from the UN
How many times do you use a toilet in a day? Exactly. What's the purpose of a cellphone? To stay with you constantly. I'm currently in halls of accommodation in a University in the UK - and our flat has 12+ cell phones, and 4 toilets. Anyone from the UN reading this? Hence - in terms of pure numbers - there is never a need for as many toilets as the number of cellphones.
IF they're not counting numbers - how exactly do they define 'access'? Asking you where you go in the morning? Indians are the most creative in the world I might add - if you really wanted to go, and were worried about sanitation - you might even walk into a restaurant, sit down for two minutes, drink your complimentary glass of water to get you prepped, walk into the toilet, do your business, and run like hell, before the owner admonishes you. Yes, it probably doesn't happen, but I've just given Bollywood an idea, and restaurateurs headaches. :P
Moreover, a VAST VAST part of India still lives in rural areas - where it literally is "jhaadi ke peeche" (behind the bushes), or "railway ki patri pe" (near the train tracks) (the latter because the elevated bed of gravel for the tracks shields you from passers-by), and in the fields. This has been done for eons! It's biological waste going back into the environment - no problems there.
The issues raised are of water contamination - and this may be attributed to so many different causes. In villages, it's broken down methods of water collection, in cities - it's the same, but it the latter there is also the sheer lack of amenities, and it's a pain associated with numbers, and the large population.
What they'd be much better off doing - first, is to isolate the collection of drinking water, and ensure it's free from contamination. Things as simple as preventing solid run-off from accumulating in a reservoir. I say that because you can take the horse to the water, but it's tough to make it drink. i.e. you can build toilets, but will people pay to use them?
In rural areas - they have access to their local wells and lakes - and they've never had problems for years. The arrival of these capitalist factories, and pollution of these water bodies with effluents of chemical harm, as opposed to biological virulence is a much bigger problem.
Also, a mobile phone occupies your personal space, a toilet needs plumbing and real estate. The capitalists so vaunted for bringing about the phone revolution (might I add that the government phone provider BSNL is still the largest, and the one with most penetration), and connecting people with phones only do things where there is potential for profit. Even if you set up a toilet with an LCD TV for a display of ads, and charged people Rs. 10 a go (they wouldn't go - mind you, they'd just urinate somewhere else - this is inertia) - you wouldn't make as much advertising revenue. A mobile phone on the other hand - as incrementally lucrative as is the lacuna in numbers of toilets and phones. One makes you money, the other costs money. Arguably, the cost is offset by that you'd need to spend on healthcare, but we're talking about the account books of the immediate service provider here.
Admitted, under "CSR" they are building free and tolled- toilet booths (Nirmala toilets - as part of a cleaner Bangalore is a project being undertaken by IT Giant Infosys), but the government has installed toilets at public spaces too!
All in all, yes- more has to be done - especially to clean up - and make functional the toilets that already exist. Having had to use these public toilets - which are hardly cleaned, I wouldn't be surprised if the use promoted infection rather than the opposite.
I'm only miffed that the UN has a WHOLE HOST OF OTHER MORE IMPORTANT ISSUES - where SOLUTIONS ARE NOT SO OBVIOUS - to consider, and SHOW ITS EXPERTISE IN, as opposed to taking an acknowledged problem, currently being worked on - and make a hue and cry about it. What's worse is that the report insidiously links it to a sector in which India is leading the world (cheap, remote communication) and somehow transfers the moral blame for the sanitation problem onto this brigade. I wouldn't call it deliberate, but it adds vitriol to the cabinets of the cynics who scoff at India, and her resilient resurgence, trivialising the legitimate no-mean-feat accomplishments in the telecom sector. While I assume leaders are more mature than to point out such niggles in state-discussions, to try and damage India's projection of herself as a serious power, such reporting will become the cynosure of a discussion that two people might have at a pub - and will always defeat anything positive said about India. They will know - in the back of their minds, that it's a futile attempt to resist the soft-power conquest, but they still continue to take others' dirty linen and wash it in public. But hey, we know how to live with shit.