By Thalif Deen
STOCKHOLM, Aug 24 2005 (IPS)

The United Nations estimates that 2.6 billion people, including over 700 million in India, do not have the luxury of household toilets or the privacy of a secluded latrine.

As a U.S. daily newspaper pointed out the other day, hundreds of slum dwellers in the sprawling Indian city of Mumbai are forced to use the adjacent rail tracks as public toilets every morning.

And as the rush hour trains come hurtling down the tracks every five or 10 minutes, the newspaper said, the bowel movements of the hapless slum dwellers are subject to the day&#39s train schedule.

"It&#39s a reality – but an unfortunate reality," says an Asian water and sanitation expert participating in a symposium to mark "World Water Week" in the Swedish capital this week.

Although water and sanitation sound like inseparable twins, one is prioritised over the other, says Roberto Lenton, chair of the World Health Organisation&#39s (WHO) Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).

People and communities are often less aware of the relationship between sanitation and health than that between clean water and health, he said. He also points out that sanitation tends to fall between the cracks.

As the new chair of the WSSCC, which has already launched a global campaign for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All, he plans to do just that.

Less than 400 people in a typical African village of 1,000 have access to a latrine, says the WHO and the U.N. children&#39s agency UNICEF.

And on any given day, over 20 of these villages, three-quarters of whose residents comprise children under five years old, suffer from diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases.

According to estimates by the two U.N. agencies, more than two million children die each year from diarrhoea or diseases resulting from poor sanitation.

Lenton admits that most of the countries "off track" in achieving the goals relating to water and sanitation are in Africa – but not necessarily in numbers.

"In absolute figures, the largest number of people without water and sanitation are in Asia. But if you look country by country, it is sub-Saharan Africa that has fallen far behind," he added.

Still, in Africa, more than in any other part of the world, sanitation is much more acute and much more difficult to resolve than water supplies, he said.

Of the 2.6 billion people with no access to improved sanitation globally, at least 75 percent live in Asia, 18 percent in Africa, and five percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Between India and China alone, there are more than 1.2 billion rural people without access to adequate sanitation.

"India and China have the largest numbers," said Lenton, "but they also have the most aggressive programmes for achieving their goals."

At the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002, the international community agreed to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

If this goal is to be met, at least 1.3 billion additional people need to gain access to basic sanitation before the targeted date.

"Raising the profile of sanitation and hygiene is difficult principally because it is a topic subject to wide-ranging cultural taboos," says a study commissioned by the government of Norway last year.

"There are, however, lessons to be learned from the experience of HIV/AIDS, another subject riven with cultural taboos, which has nonetheless succeeded in gaining the spotlight and mobilising general support across cultures," said the report titled "Securing Sanitation: the Compelling Case to Address the Crisis".

Still, in Bangladesh, the emphasis between water and sanitation seems to have been reversed.

"The water crisis in Bangladesh is very acute," Tauhid Ibne Farid of Action Aid Bangladesh told IPS. Although millions are suffering from a shortage of water and the threat of arsenic poisoning, "we are concentrating more on sanitation than water", he said.

The government has launched massive programmes in support of sanitation. "But they don&#39t realise that if you don&#39t supply water, sanitation would not work," said Farid, Action Aid&#39s associate coordinator for natural resources and services, livelihood security and risk reduction.

In a publication released here, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) said that both U.N. and aid agencies have supported around 1,000 government latrine production centres in rural Bangladesh.

"Latrine coverage remained at a low level, despite high investments. This situation changed drastically when a new approach was adopted – moving from a cheap hardware focus towards social mobilisation, to create a market for private latrine producers," SDC said.

As a result, latrine coverage increased rapidly, from around 25 percent to around 50 percent, and thousands of new jobs were created in the private sector. Today, around 6,000 small rural enterprises produce about 1.2 million latrines per year.

And the government of Bangladesh has set an ambitious target to meet all of the country&#39s sanitation needs by 2010.

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