To save lives, an Indian doctor rethinks the toilet
August 23, 2009 by Sebastien Buffet
Bindeshwar Pathak (left), receives the Stockholm Water prize from Swedish Prince Carl Philip at the Town Hall in Stockholm, on August 20. Bindeshwar is the founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in India.
By rethinking the humble toilet, Indian sanitation expert Bindeshwar Pathak has found a way that can save water -- and lives -- in developing countries.
For four decades, His Sulabh Sanitation Movement has equipped more than 1.2 million households with eco-friendly toilets and installed 7,500 public lavatories across India.
Yet almost three out of four Indians, or around 700 million people, still have no access to basic sanitation.
This leads to up to half a million deaths each year, Pathak, 66, told AFP at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, where he was awarded this year's Stockholm Water Prize for his groundbreaking work.
To lower the risk to human health, Pathak developed a twin-pit, pour-flush toilet known as the Sulabh, that uses a pair of tanks to store waste matter with no smell or soil pollution, pending recycling as fertiliser.
It uses significantly less water than a standard toilet, Pathak said.
"It requires only 1.0 to 1.5 liters to flush instead of 10 liters," he said. "It saves trillions of litres of water each year."
The idea is to discourage both open-air defecation and the use of bucket toilets -- options that ramp up the risk of the spread of disease and diarrhoea.
"People have died of cholera cleaning the bucket toilets," Pathak explained.
When a Sulabh is sold to households, its price is adjusted according to a family's ability to pay. The poorest families pay 15 dollars (10 euros) whereas richer families can be asked to pay up to 1,000 dollars.
The Sulabh Sanitation Movement's campaign to raise awareness of health issues has also seen more and more Indians prepared to pay user charges for its 7,500 public toilets.
Staffed 24 hours a day, they cost one dollar a month to use them by subscription -- with an exemption for slum dwellers, women and children.
"For the whole month, you can go to the toilet, you can have a bath, you can drink water," Pathak said.
The Sulabh has been exported to Afghanistan and Bhutan, and there are also plans to ship some to 15 other countries, most of them in Africa.
"I feel very happy because what we have been doing for the last 40 years, now it feels that we are going in the right direction," Pathak told AFP.
As the winner of the Stockholm Water Prize, Pathak receives a cheque for 150,000 dollars (104,700 euros) in recognition of his work to conserve water and improve public health.
(c) 2009 AFP
Jan 19, 2007 |
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Toilets are the dumbest designs ever for something to pee and poop in.
Just imagine, if something from another world that had a major lack of water showed up and saw that we poop into fresh water, we would look like major A-holes.
( I cant help but to look at everything from a sci-fi stand point, sorry )
Technologies like this are investments in the future even if you don't believe in global warming.
'Idiocracy'
Because people are too dumb to use separate sources properly and will end up infecting themselves and their children with substandard water-born diseases.
Of course we can easily solve this problem by throwing lots of energy at it through desalinization. Saudi Arabia actually uses this method to provide much of it's freshwater today.
I think the first issue that needs to be addressed is sanitation. Once people are pooping where they should be, then you can worry about using less water to flush it. After all, they are not pooping in the streets due to a lack of flushing water are they!! Hello!
Don't get me wrong, water conservation is a good thing but it has very little to do with the where and why of pooping practices in third world countries!
BTW, how many toilets would that $150,000 buy for India?