Indian Official Wants White People to Stop Telling Indians How to Poop

[Furnace]

Indian Official Wants White People to Stop Telling Indians How to Poop




Toilets don't work when you have no water.

Since he was elected in 2014, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pushed a strong sanitation agenda on the country. A big part of this has been a widespread crackdown on open defecation, popularized by NGOs and the World Health Organization over the years. Suddenly, poop became very political in India, with millions of rupees allocated to building toilets across the country.

But a few days ago, Dipali Rastogi, an Indian official who was focused on tribal issues, took to the pages of a national newspaper to push back. In an op-ed called 'Some Washroom Wisdom' she wagged her finger at the way the government and the inexhaustible list of nonprofits in India have shit on some habits in the name of progress and adhering to Western standards. Rastogi points out that forcing Indians to build or use toilets without addressing water scarcity is ignorant.

"Now, however, the goras [white people] are saying it's unhygienic to leave your excreta out in the fields. That it causes underground water pollution. That it causes diarrhoea, even malnutrition. We must build a toilet within the house," she writes.

Rastogi points out there isn't enough water to sustain or flush these toilets in a lot of Indian villages—around 774 million people have inadequate access to clean water. Building toilets, then, just becomes a bandaid on a much larger wound, and forcing people to use them without proper infrastructure becomes discriminatory, especially against rural Indians who have coexisted peacefully with fields and forests for generations.



Source

[Colonel Frank Grimes]

I want to poke fun but in all seriousness the guy has a point with the following:

Rastogi points out there isn't enough water to sustain or flush these toilets in a lot of Indian villages—around 774 million people have inadequate access to clean water.

It's not feasible, imo. This is based on many years of me not being an experienced plumber.