In slums of India, toilets lag cell plans
Government doesn't deliver basic services
Monday, November 1, 2010 02:51 AM
BY RAVI NESSMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RAFIQ MAQBOOL | ASSOCIATED PRE SS
A boy talks on a cell phone in a Mumbai slum. When President Obama visits India this week, he will find a country of startlingly uneven development and perplexing disparities.
MUMBAI, India - The Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar has no clean water for its shacks made of ripped tarp and bamboo. No garbage pickup along the rocky, pocked earth that serves as a road. No power except from cables strung illegally and haphazardly overhead.
And not a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 people.
Yet nearly every destitute family in the slum has a cell phone. Some have three.
When President Barack Obama visits India on Saturday, he will find a country of startlingly uneven development and perplexing disparities, where more people have cell phones than access to a toilet, according to the United Nations.
It is a country buoyed by a vibrant business world of call centers and software developers, but hamstrung by a bloated, corrupt government that has failed to deliver the barest of services.
Its estimated growth rate of 8.5 percent a year is among the highest in the world, but its roads are crumbling.
It offers cheap, world-class medical care to Western tourists at private hospitals, yet it has some of the worst child mortality and maternal death rates outside sub-Saharan Africa.
And although tens of millions have benefited from India's rise, many more remain mired in some of the worst poverty in the world.
The cell-phone frenzy bridges all worlds. Cell phones are sold amid the Calvin Klein and Clinique stores under the soaring atriums of India's new malls, and in the crowded markets of its working-class neighborhoods. Bare shops in the slums sell pre-paid cards for as little as 20 cents next to packets of chewing tobacco, while street hawkers peddle car chargers at traffic lights.
The spartan Beecham's in New Delhi's Connaught Place, one of the country's seemingly ubiquitous mobile-phone dealers, is overrun with lunchtime customers of all classes looking for everything from a $790 Blackberry Torch to a basic, $26 Nokia.
Store manager Sanjeev Malhotra adds to a decades-old - and still unfulfilled - Hindi campaign slogan promising food, clothing an d shelter. " Roti, kapda, makaan" - and "mobile," he said, laughing. "Basic needs."
There were more than 670 million cell-phone connections in India by the end of August, a number that has been growing by close to 20 million a month, according to government figures.
Yet U.N. figures show that only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine, leaving 665 million to defecate in the open.
"At least tap water and sewage disposal - how can we talk about any development without these two fundamental things? How can we talk about development without health and education?" said Anita Patil-Deshmukhl, executive director of PUKAR, an organization that conducts research and outreach in Mumbai.
The government is spending $350 million a year to build toilets in rural areas. Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement, estimates the country needs about 120 million more latrines - likely the largest sanitation project in history.
"Those in power, only they can change the situation," said Pathak, who claims to have helped build a million low-cost latrines in India in the past 40 years. "India can achieve this - if it desires."
In the slums of Mumbai, home to more than half the city's population of 14 million, the yearning for toilets is so great that residents have built makeshift outhouses on their own.
Since there are no water pipes or wells in Rafiq Nagar, a crowded, 15-year-old slum on the lip of a 110-acre garbage dump, residents are fo rced to rely on the water mafia for water for cooking, washing clothes, bathing and drinking. The neighborhood is rife with skin infections, tuberculosis and other ailments.
"If the government would give us water, we would pay that money to the government," said Suresh Pache, 41, a motorized rickshaw driver.
In fact, the spread of cell phones might end up bringing toilets.
R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, one of India's most revered companies, says the rising aspirations of the poor, buttressed by their growing access to communication and information, will put tremendous pressure on the government.
People already are starting to challenge local officials who for generations answered to no one, he says.
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