Asia: Sanitation Experts Call For All-Out Efforts

BANGKOK, Mar 20 (IPS) – New technology, religion and the market must be harnessed to secure basic toilet facilities for Asia’s rural and urban poor, sanitation experts from the region said here Thursday.

Currently, over 2.6 billion people across the world have no access to an organised system of toilets, of which some 1.5 billion people live in the Asia-Pacific region, states Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a regional U.N. body based in Bangkok, which hosted a conference on sanitation.

And every year, over 200 million tonnes of human waste go uncollected and untreated globally, adds ECSAP. This not only fouls the environment and spreads diseases, but forces the people with no access to toilets to ‘’live in deeper poverty and indignity.’’

‘’If you want to solve the problem, you have to talk about the appropriate technology that works,’’ said Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of India’s Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement, in a keynote address. ‘’In many developing countries, due to lack of affordable sanitation technology, sanitation coverage was far below the level of satisfaction.’’

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