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India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
- jimmykennedy 9y ago"I can’t think of another time when a national leader has broached such a sensitive topic so frankly and so publicly." Was Gates not around when everyone was talking about which bathroom transgender people should use? Typical cisgendered white male billionaire.
- sctb 9y agoIf you'd like to continue commenting on Hacker News you'll have to do so civilly and substantively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- soperj 9y agoand yet Bill is completely fucking up public education in the US.
- gnode 9y agoDo you have a reason for saying this?
- alpha_squared 9y agoI'm not sure I understand what this is in reference to. Mind providing some more details? I'm genuinely curious.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- WillyOnWheels 9y agohttp://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-education-20160601-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-educat...
- elevenfist 9y agoHmm, it doesn't appear to be their intention to fuck up education though. They tried to fund smaller classes but it ended up not improving performance and made schools more costly over the long term, (crappy instructors/hiring policies were likely the root cause of the failure, and then those new small schools didn't provide a good ror on the money invested vs other projects) So then they tried to improve teacher quality with bonus schemes, but their implementation made the problem worse (who decides who gets the bonus? What happens when the majority are mediocre bad actors?). Then they backed common core which was rolled out quickly for fear that teachers, schools, and parents would water it down. And there was a vehement backlash. It looks like they just keep fucking up on the little details, which naturally is going to fuck up initiatives that could've worked. They need better employees and a ceo :/
- WillyOnWheels 9y ago> Hmm, it doesn't appear to be their intention to fuck up education though. I agree the Gates Foundation does not intend to screw up public education.
- douche 9y agoThe road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- soperj 9y agoThey've literally had zero success reforming education and figured the best way to rectify that would be to lobby to bring that zero success to the entire country. For someone who believes in evidence based policy(and bonuses for teachers), this is such a fucking failure there's no other way to put it.
- nojvek 9y agoTwo of the most forward thinking folks I believe are Bill Gates and Elon Musk. While Elon wants to carve way into science fiction, Bill wants to ensure no one gets left behind. Exciting time to be alive. In this case big kudos goes to Narendra Modi and the Indian govt to ensure this happens. I believe such fundamental things are the most effective when govt pushes for it rather than individuals.
- pm90 9y agoTo be sure, it is a combined effort. The part I really like about this is that they are really serious about solving the problem and are thinking outside the box in many situations. If it was a purely government directive, I don't think it would have made much difference. But yes, it does help immensely when the country's leader declares it as a top priority.
- victor106 9y agoWho is Narendra Modi? Edit:- read the article.thanks...
- myko 9y agoIndia's Prime Minister
- msound 9y agoNarendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. He has a very interesting (and controversial) history. He grew up selling tea at a railway station and now he's Prime Minister of the largest democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi
- chetanahuja 9y ago> He has a very interesting (and controversial) history Sure does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots
- pm90 9y agoHeh, I think Gates might have inadvertently DDoS'd the dashboard detailing toilet coverage in Rural India. I won't post the link here but its at the end of the article.
- vthallam 9y agoGlad this initiative is working. The Indian govt emphasizes on this very frequently and I am surprised to see this dashboard: http://sbm.gov.in/sbmdashboard/Default.aspx http://sbm.gov.in/sbmdashboard/Default.aspx
- cholantesh 9y agoHah; my workplace has a firewall rule for connections to India. Seems bizarre.
- arcticbull 9y agoBased on my walk to work along Mission street, I'd say we've got something to learn X_x
- perfectstorm 9y agoseriously, i exit at Powell station and the amount of shit and piss i smell every day is unimaginable.
- linux_devil 9y agoThis village in India is the cleanest village in asia, sharing one article: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160606-the-cleanest-village-in-asia http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160606-the-cleanest-villag...
- pthreads 9y agoThis is cool. Apparently it's been ingrained in their culture, and for over a hundred years!
- bramakris 9y agoThere's also a official city ranking - https://gramener.com/swachhbharat/ https://gramener.com/swachhbharat/
- prawn 9y agoThe article talks about various people contributing to the regular cleaning. I think one solution to the developing job/motivation crisis is some sort of Civilian Conservation Corps providing a base wage to people in exchange for a few hours each week of easy, non-essential work contributing to the general decency of a locale. Pruning, sweeping an area, weeding a verge, removing litter from a roadside. The sort of work you see gardeners doing at dawn throughout Asia, especially in resorts. There could be many older men for example keen to have a sense of purpose, doing a task they're capable of and staying active, rather than putting in 40+ hours/week at a desk.
- zerop 9y agoNarendra Modi, a person who can change things in India.. Because he knows Sankhya.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nindalf 9y agoThat's not a very helpful comment considering that most people on this forum wouldn't be familiar with that concept. For those trying to decipher this, he's referring to a school of philosophy. It's quite silly to say that anyway, because a person's thoughts on philosophy rarely predict how good they would be at passing legislation and working with bureaucracy. > Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? > George R R Martin
- agustamir 9y agoI hope that all these toilets being built are actually being used, serviced and maintained by the people of the community. I have seen TV reports where these toilets were being built to achieve targets and end up being either filthy because no one maintained them, or used as storage(?). This, along with a massive awareness drive(the govt has some ads running on tv) to push people towards using these toilets. Many challenges ahead, and I can only hope for the best for the motherland.
- indogooner 9y agoUnfortunately your fears are not unfounded. I have been to a village which is supposed to be model village for the constituency (adopted by the ruling party legislator). Open defecation has not reduced significantly. The toilets built are in a deplorable state and if people are not using them it is understandable. I think the public is also to be blamed for this but if the legislator can't introduce/inculcate mindset change in just one model village in their constituency it is not encouraging.
- avar 9y ago> Unfortunately, in many places, it’s not > feasible to lay down sewer pipes or build > treatment facilities. [...] But giving > people access to toilets isn’t enough. You > also have to persuade them to use the > toilets. I can't find it now, but there was a news video making the rounds a year or two ago that showed that this problem is much more fundamental than that. It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were falling ill because they were literally taking a shit in the same river that they were getting their drinking water from, just a few meters away. These people all knew each other, and even if they didn't have any toilets or basic infrastructure I would have thought that something as basic as "if you shit where you drink, you get cholera" would be common knowledge anywhere in the world by now. Of course it would have been nice for those people to have sewer pipes, toilets etc. But in that case the problem could have been solved with a few shovels, and a marked area indicating where you should be going to do your business, preferable in some open field far from the drinking water. For those people toilets would be nice, but unnecessary. They clearly all have a shared interest in not drinking each other's shit. If by some magic they aren't aware that mixing shit with water leads to bad consequences that seemed to be solvable by some one-time government presentation on the consequences of them keeping doing what they were doing. But somehow the problem persists, it's unbelievable.
- politicalthrow 9y agoCould it be an example of a tragedy of the commons? No one wants to drink water where someone shit but everyone would rather shit in the water than in a field somewhere far and away from the ability to clean oneself.
- CodeCube 9y agothis is it right here ... what better way to get that baby-fresh feeling than just popping a squat in the river, where the current takes away your inanimate offspring downstream, and cleans your nether regions. Humans are creatures of habit, and often, self interest (a clean arse) will win over benefits to others (see all politics ever, almost)
- 9y ago
- blhack 9y agoIt's outlined in the article, but I think it's worth saying again: the most difficult part of what they're doing seems to be getting people to change their habits. It's the same psychology involved in pollution and climate change. Because people don't see an immediate reaction to for instance plastic-pollution, it's harder to get them to understand the serious effects that it is having.
- nemacol 9y agoI get what you are saying, but a turd on the ground is pretty immediate. :P
- blhack 9y agoWell that is true, but the effects that turd has on drinking water and overall health isn't quite as obvious.
- vivekd 9y agoisn't it, I mean it lets off a strong order to warn us. Are there people in the world who don't realize that poo is bad for you?
- weeksie 9y agoSpoken like someone who hasn't spent a lot of time in India ;)
- johnnydoe9 9y agoYeah they're doing great work but I've actually met people who told us they didn't want to use the toilets because they couldn't "build up the pressure" in the cramped space since they are used to the open fields since decades. This is going to take a long time but they're actually doing a pretty good job at installing toilets that's for sure.
- mkagenius 9y ago> build up the pressure That's true for modern humans too -- without the phone, they can't build up the pressure.
- noiv 9y agoRequest to de-weaponize the title. War should denote humans fighting humans only - not humans fighting physics.
- function_seven 9y agoIt sounds like you’re waging a war on metaphor. And losing.
- noiv 9y agoWell, nothing against metaphors, but 'war' is really not a pleasing one and it isn't useful either since truth is its first victim. Why using a title forcing the reader to assume bullshit follows.
- Neliquat 9y agoRequest to re-humanize humans. Denotation should be for non humans only - we recodnise people. Point: sure, language has meaning and we constantly abuse it a bit, but policing it tends to hurt more then help.
- ourmandave 9y agoLet's hope we don't declare the War on Human Waste.(tm) Billions will be spent on tracking down "who left the toilet seat up" and non-flushers will be considered terrorists.
- PetitPrince 9y agoI agree with you. However I a trouble finding an alternative to "war on"; all the alternative I can think of seems not serious , too wordy or not catchy enough. I don't know if it's because how my weak command of English language (not a native speaker after all) or it's a problem inherent to language and this expression itself. "India is having an an human waste revolution" "India: the great poop forward". "'Clean India' is solving India's human waste problem"
- thowbit9 9y agoWow very proud of my state Kerala which looks the cleanest. Kerala always stands out from rest of the India in all positive aspects.
- criddell 9y agoI love UNICEF's approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_peUxE_BKcU
- thowbit9 9y agoThis has nothing to do with building toilets. Its with education. The northern parts of India has very low literacy rate. High literacy + HDI states like Kerala and Meghalaya was already clean. The dashboard of 2014 data proves that.
- burkaman 9y agoIf you don't have a toilet, how does learning how to read help you not poop in the open?
- andrewvijay 9y agohow will they not poop in the open if they dont know pooping in the open leads to diseases?
- thowbit9 9y agoBecause learning makes people less stupid in our part of the world.
- burkaman 9y agoThey literally don't have a toilet. Are they going to conjure one if they become smart enough? I understand there's an issue of people not using them once they have one, but step one is getting a toilet, and step two is educating people enough to want to use them.
- sirclueless 9y agoI'm not so sure. Step 1 is making sure people want a toilet. If you give someone a toilet without their understanding its purpose, it is going to be neglected and considered pointless. If people want toilets, they can spend some free time to dig a big pit in a nearby yard, and it will be more sanitary than their current situation. Ultimately the two go hand in hand (toilets and education) but education without toilets is a problem that solves itself, while toilets without education is doomed to fail.
- dafrankenstein2 9y agothen finally its happening? once we heard that India has more phone users than toilet users.
- thowbit9 9y agoWhat I see and hear from the people on the field is that Narendra Modi is a show man with no stuff. Dashboard looks cool, but those toilets built are not maintained and is in the verge of wreck.
- intended 9y agoA long my time ago, a steel company installed toilets in Orissa (I hope I'm recalling the conversation exactly). They've just fallen into disrepair. People didn't use them. This is a habit change that has to be completed, once that happens, a lot will change on its own.
- thowbit9 9y agoThere was an initiative in the state of Kerala for bio portable toilets with solar powered light. I saw one or two in the Cochin city which uses a 1 rupee coin to open the door. The problem with these initiatives is that they are all politically motivated. Once the ruling parties get the necessary PR around it, the funding is stopped. Modi is no different. There is no reason to laud Modi for this. The previous governments have also done this though with a less "catchy" names with no PR.
- vthallam 9y ago> The problem with these initiatives is that they are all politically motivated. So what's your plan? Stop trying? >The previous governments have also done this though with a less "catchy" names with no PR. Come on man. Hate Modi all you want and there are few reasons, but this is not one. He is trying to get people accountable, at least talking about the issue. You don't even understand the buzz a topic creates if PM of 1 billion people repeatedly reminds us about the importance of sanitation. I don't want to start any objective discussion with a throw away account, so, I'd say keep an open mind.
- ezhil 9y agoI second this. No doubt the effort is laudable. The funding comes from Swachh Bharat cess though. But I too see quite a lot of PR around this. This scheme was the one among the first to project Modi as a modern day Indian saviour. The very first effort to bring even opponents together.
- baron816 9y agoWait, did Bill Gates really go out to the train tracks in India and film people pooping?
- blobbers 9y agoIndia is Winning Its War on Human Waste!!! ... unfortunately San Francisco is losing that same war.
- adventured 9y agoOr you could be intentionally exaggerating the problem by about 100 fold. Perhaps you'd like to show me the stats that indicate a million people (or even how about 2.5% - ~100k people) in the San Francisco metro area have begun shitting in the streets, in their drinking water, etc.
- adamkittelson 9y agoOr we could explore the possibility that the acceptable amount of human feces on the streets of a major city in a first world country is none.
- droopyEyelids 9y agoYou can't reliably tell the difference between human and other omnivore feces, and there are always going to be coyotes pooping wherever they please. Gotta accept a bit of poop in your life.
- GeneralMayhem 9y agoThere's not a lot of coyotes in downtown SF...
- droopyEyelids 9y agohttp://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coyote-filmed-playing-with-ball-9132048.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coyote-f... > Record numbers of coyotes have moved into the city in recent years.
- magic_beans 9y ago
- jwilk 9y agoArchived copy, which can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.fo/V1Vtq https://archive.fo/V1Vtq
- sytelus 9y agoThe reason toilets don't get used even when available in India is that Indian version of toilets are not very maintainable. First every one needs to get water from somewhere and carry it all the way with them to toilet. If water turns out not to be enough then toilet retains the waste, start becoming smelly and unhygienic. Also because of extensive water use, its unpleasant place to walk around. Toilets with flushing system uses 1950s mechanical system and often breaks down easily or gets plugged easily with no way to unplug it unless maintainer comes around (who often doesn't exist). So the basic problem is Indian toilet tech and the whole process has not been evolved. In Western world and especially places like Japan, there are lots of people working on innovations in this area and things keep improving. In India, this area is considered to be assigned to lowest members of social cast system and thinking about it or working on it by intellectuals is considered taboo.
- aianus 9y agoWhy can't they use outhouses? They're just holes in the ground (very little maintenance, no requirement for plumbing) and far better than shitting out in the open or in a potable water source.
- CydeWeys 9y agoOuthouses fill up very quickly with lots of people using them. You need regular service with someone picking up the shit. Exactly like Port-a-Johns, really.
- Taylor_OD 9y agoOnly 1.7 million people die from unsafe water? That's a lot less than I thought. It's still a awful and fixable issue but not as bad as I thought.
- danans 9y agoI'm sure a much larger number get seriously ill, but don't die, so the potential for quality of life improvement is even bigger.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThat's per year. It seems like an awfully high number to me. To contrast, something like 2.5M Americans are dying in total from all causes every year.
- Pica_soO 9y agoThe thing that strikes me as the most odd - is that until ww1 (thats right the recent Battlefieldified one)- soldiers would carry talismans into the battle, that where supposed to make them bulletproof and immortal. Thats right, something that sounds oh, so exotic, right in the midst of the west. Also, it helps if you look at the Congo and Europe during WW2. The same chaos, the same refugee rows, the same anarchy and murdering. Noting is written in stone.
- ralfd 9y agoThat doesn't sound so odd? I bet quite a few modern soldiers still have some talismans or lucky charms.
- prawn 9y agoI imagine prayer is quite common in the military, as one example.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoIf someone's shooting at you, you're going to make damn sure you take every measure possible to not get shot. There are no atheists in foxholes.
- anigbrowl 9y agoI don't get that phrase. I've been in a bunch of life-and-death situations and not once have I felt a sudden alteration in my religious views. I have to wonder whether it's an expression of anxiety on the part of the speaker rather than any sort of objective observation.
- JabavuAdams 9y ago> There are no atheists in foxholes. This is just a thing that people say that doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
- vacri 9y agoHowever being in a foxhole is an entirely artificial situation, and people in foxholes aren't known for their long-range planning and forethought. If you're being shelled, you're not going to be thinking about whether you can service a new mortgage and whether you should refinance, for example.
- redsummer 9y agoHinduism is a big problem. The Ganges is literally a river of shit - it has 120 times the safe level of fecal matter. Yet Hindus regard it as purifying and it's considered holy to have a dip in it. When you have a culture like that, it's going to be hard to persuade people to not shit in the water they drink.
- kahrkunne 9y agoTrue. The Ganges is probably one of the most disgusting things on earth. If your religion involves worshipping (and drinking of) a river full of poop and bloated human corpses, I couldn't justify it as civilized even if I tried.
- dang 9y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Flamewars are not welcome here, especially not the religious and racial sort, which are poisonous and have no place on HN. Unsubstantive and uncivil comments, which you've posted more than your share of, are also out of line. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that this won't happen in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- toast0 9y agoYou're going to have to make the connection between being a holy river, so people want to wade or swim in it and being ok with polluting it. If anything, I would think you could get people onboard with not putting their waste into a holy river?
- nonamechicken 9y agoMajority of Hindus have never even seen Ganges. Almost everyone in my state baths twice a day, washes their hands/mouth before and after eating, and we have been using bidets for 15 years at least.
- dang 9y ago
- Asooka 9y agoThat's Roma for you. I've seen educated Roma people, but they also have examples of some of the most parasitic and unhygienic behaviour. IIRC, various cultures have tried to integrate them and get them to behave in a more civilized manner over the last 1000 years give or take, with precisely zero success.
- kahrkunne 9y agoThis is getting downvoted because it's true. (and no, before anyone pulls that card, it's not racist. It's cultural)
- bdamm 9y agoZero success? An outlandish claim requires an equivalently convincing citation. This sounds more like "I've seem Roma people doing unclean things, therefore all Roma people cannot be integrated to be clean" where in fact all that is happening is the confirmation bias at work, because what you didn't see was all the Roma people who were integrated and using toilets like everyone else.
- dang 9y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14207350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14207350 and marked it off-topic.
- kahrkunne 9y agoHow astonishing that a nation like India is just now learning to poo in the loo, yet somehow we in the west still think it's sensible to outsource our tech work to them (and then act surprised when the results are less than stellar)
- SophosQ 9y agoGiven the level of economic and educational disparity that persists in the population it's an obvious consequence that you'd have a country that can send an unmanned mission to Mars while still suffering from illiteracy. It'd be unwise to generalise the capabilities of a country where such a large variance exists in the population's technical aptitude especially when it's of nearly a billion people.
- pshirali 9y agoThis is a disgusting comment :(
- walrus01 9y agoI recall seeing a video of a property owner who has a piece of land with a long, approx 2.5 meter height wall facing a street in a suburb of Delhi. He had a significant problem with the wall becoming an unofficial "designated pissing wall" and the whole place reeked of urine. Problem was solved by first power washing the wall and then hiring a few local mural painters to paint images of various Hindu gods (Hanuman, Ganesh, etc) on the wall. No more pissing problem.
- jarmitage 9y agoRead the comments of this article. I think the 'poor' of India should be telling Bill Gates where to shit and not the other way around.
- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoIt's worth to note that to fund the Swachh Bharat mission business in India are contributing 0.5% towards it via service tax on every bill. It's a collective effort of public-govt-private partnership.
- danellis 9y agoI guess I'm confused as to why this is only a problem for women and girls. Are there toilets that the men use that they don't let the women use? Or is it that Indian men don't have a problem with themselves defecating anywhere?
- skbohra123 9y agoMostly because open defacting creates other issues for women, like sexual harrasment, rape etc.
- throwaway12837 9y agoHN is one step away from becoming 4chan.
- theprop 9y agoThis is probably the single best way to reduce rape in India as well. I remember in one Indian tv serial episode, the plot was a woman who refused to marry a man (in a village) until he got indoor plumbing in the house so she didn't have to go to a field at night to use the bathroom. India was one of the first countries in the world to emphasize regular bathing -- this was thousands of years ago, even the kings among the Europeans started bathing daily fewer than 300 years ago. We need to get hygiene country-wide to the world standards it created.
- Myrmornis 9y agoThe Ethiopian countryside along main roads (Oromia and south of there) seems to also have acquired a lot of public toilets in the last 5 years.
- rajitdasgupta 9y agoI'd say take this data with a healthy pinch of salt. I have friends currently working in conjunction with the Health and Sanitation department who say that the ground reality is very different. As someone else noted in another thread, toilet maintenance and water availability continue to remain a very real problem. The dashboard data reflects only the number of new toilets being built (and their corresponding 'expected' coverage). This doesn't take into account how many of them are actually being used as toilets. In some districts in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, less than 1 out of 15 households actually use the newly built toilets. Elsewhere, they have already been converted into mini-grocery stores and storage facilities. All these instances are being conveniently ignored.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jsudhams 9y agoI have had and have two issues in my village especially for poor. 1. Keeping the toilet in home, this is no issue(99% of my village is fine with it)but having exhaust and running it is still an issue 2. Running water with pipe , if you ask a must if you need good toilet. A big issue for 6 months in our village so able people built storage tank , pump up water when water comes in pipe from village tank but for the ones who keep in vessels , it is big issue 3. Space for septic tank, in many plots house is built on full land available to them so no more space for septic tank 4. Last but not least, if you have issue septic there is not a possibility to clean like in city using that special lorry that come with pump and tank If govt can do something about 2/3/4 then it is possible to have more toilets.