Its the important things that really count

jimpeel

jimpeel

Well-Known Member
[East Indian dialect]"So there I was, shitting by the side of the road ..." [/East Indian dialect]

More cell phones than toilets. We likely passed that milestone here in America within the first year after the introduction of cell phones.

SOURCE

India has more mobile phones than toilets: UN report
Far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet, according to a UN study on sanitation.

Published: 4:40PM BST 15 Apr 2010

India's mobile subscribers totalled 563.73 million at the last count, enough to serve nearly half of the country's 1.2 billion population.

But just 366 million people - around a third of the population - had access to proper sanitation in 2008, said the study published by the United Nations University, a UN think-tank.

"It is a tragic irony to think in India, a country now wealthy enough that roughly half of the people own phones," so many people "cannot afford the basic necessity and dignity of a toilet," said Zafar Adeel, the UN University director.

Mr Adeel heads the UN University's Institute for Water, Environment and Health, based in the Canadian city of Hamilton, which prepared the report.

Worldwide, an estimated $358 billion (£230 billion) is needed between now and 2015 to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people with inadequate sanitation from 2000 levels.

Proper sanitation "could do more to save lives, especially those of young people, improve health and help pull India and other countries in similar circumstances out of poverty than any alternative investment," Mr Adeel said.

Poor sanitation is a major contributor to water-borne diseases, which in the past three years alone killed an estimated 4.5 million children under the age of five worldwide, according to the study.

The report gave a rough cost of $300 to build a toilet, including labour, materials and advice.

The world could expect a return of up to $34 for every dollar spent on sanitation through improved productivity and reduced poverty and health costs, said Adeel.

He said improving sanitation was "an economic and humanitarian opportunity of historic proportions."
Click to expand...
 
Building toilets is just a minor issue... they don't have the proper piping and sewage system/treatment centres to accommodate those $300 toilets.
 
I used to think there were two kinds of lefties
those who really believed like you
and those like Minks who know better
but refuse to admit it.

Now I'm beginning to have my doubts.
 
if the environmentalist would just OK incinerators, cheap energy...
we could kill 2 birds with one turd.
 
Winky said:
I used to think there were two kinds of lefties
those who really believed like you
and those like Minks who know better
but refuse to admit it.

Now I'm beginning to have my doubts.
Click to expand...

India is trying to leap over a few stages in development on their path towards industrialization and capitalism...one of those skipped paths is comprehensive infrastructure. Roads, sewers, mass-transit, power-generation* (less so because they do need power in certain locales). Beyond that, population control/family planning would help. They've got 1/3rd the land and nigh 4 times the population of the USA.

They have cel-phones and internet..wireless, which makes sense. You don't have to lay wire to every house and business that way. Hell, that's the way that North America and Europe are going. Home phones will soon be a thing of the past as everyone will have their own cellular wherever they go. It'll still be a big thing for business to have land-lines because of the sheer number of numbers you need to run even a mid-sized company.

The number of cells in India shouldn't be a disparaging news item.

The fact that they're ignoring their basic infrastructure in order to accelerate their run towards 1st world status is another story entirely. The same can be said for China with it's mostly rural population and it's high-tech city-centers.
 
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Who gives a shit?
 
Funny enough, if India had remained a british colony, they'd have all that stuff Bish mentioned.
 
fergit potable water gimme an iPad

One sixth of the world’s population is indeed finding it quite burdensome having to carry the other five sixths around on their backs all the time. What with the declining birth rates among whites in the developed countries it will soon become quite unsustainable.
 
Who needs clean water when you can have an iPhone?

Talk about yer Government failures.
With Osammie getting’ rid of all the nooclear weapons
how can we ever hope too lessen our burden?
 
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"Damn it! I told you to go before we left. I'm not stopping this train until we get where we're going!"
 
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