Residents of a poor area bathe with water from government taps in India last November

Until last May, Meera Devi rose before dawn each day and walked a half mile to a vegetable patch outside the village of Kachpura to find a secluded place.

With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields, on riverbanks and along roads. Devi looks back on her routine with pain and embarrassment.

“As a woman, I would have to check where the males were going to the toilet and then go in a different direction,” says Devi, 37, standing outside her one-room mud-brick home.

“We used to avoid the daytime but, if we were really pressured, we would have to go any time, even if it was raining. During the harvest season, people would have sticks in the fields. If somebody had to go, people would beat them up or chase them.”

In the shadow of its new suburbs, torrid growth and 300-million-plusstrong middle class, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency. From the stream in Devi’s village to the nation’s holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of the country’s surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent.

Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they’re not already.

Illness, lost productivity and other consequences of fouled water and inadequate sewage treatment trimmed 1.4-7.2 percent from the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2005, according to a study by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program.

Sanitation and hygiene-related issues may have an even greater impact on India’s US$1.2 trillion economy, says Guy Hutton, a water and sanitation economist with the program.

The toll on humans is grim. Every day, 1,000 children younger than five die in India from diarrhea, hepatitis-causing pathogens and other sanitation-related diseases, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

For girls, the crisis is especially acute: Many leave school once they reach puberty because of inadequate lavatories, depriving the country of a generation of possible leaders.

“India cannot reach its full economic potential unless they do something about this crisis,” says Clarissa Brocklehurst, UNICEF’s chief of water, sanitation and hygiene.

For most of this decade, India has ranked just behind China as the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Revenue from information technology and outsourcing jumped more than 300-fold to $52 billion a year. Annual per-capita income more than doubled to 24,295 rupees ($468) in the seven years to March 31, 2008.

Even with the current global recession, India’s economy will expand 5.1 percent in 2009, the International Monetary Fund projects. Yet, India’s gated office parks and residential enclaves mask a breakdown of the most basic human need – hygiene.

By installing her neighborhood’s first toilet, Devi created a point of pride. More than half of India’s 203 million households lack what Western societies consider a necessity. Some 665 million Indians defecate in the open, more than half the global total.

“It’s an embarrassment,” says Venkatraman Anantha-Nageswaran, an Indian working in Singapore for Bank Julius Baer & Co. “It’s a country that aspires to being an international power.”

India has the world’s highest childhood malnutrition rates: 44 percent of kids under five are underweight, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

“If we collectively could fix the world’s basic water and sanitation problems, we could reduce childhood mortality by nearly a third,” says Jamie Bartram, head of the World Health Organization’s water, sanitation, hygiene and health group.

Santha Sheela Nair, India’s secretary of drinking water supply, is looking for solutions, including a toilet that pays users as much as 12 US cents a month. Feces are composted and urine is used as fertilizer.

The government aims to eliminate open defecation by 2012. Right now, the number of open defecators is double the number of India’s middle class. “This gap will keep widening,” Nair says.

For the Devi family, the gap has narrowed. Devi’s neighbors are emulating her by installing household latrines and washing their hands with soap. “The solution to a thousand household problems is getting a toilet,” Devi says.

As India strives to build on two decades of growth, the sanitation struggle reveals how complicated Devi’s goal remains, and how damaging the failure to meet it may be.

Source: Bloomberg