WASH news Asia & Pacific

Bangalore, May 24: Biocon Foundation in collaboration with the Embassy of Ireland has announced the launch of the Biocon Foundation – Irish Aid Sanitation Programme on Saturday. HE Mr. Kieran Dowling, Ambassador, Republic of Ireland inaugurated the first phase of the sanitation project. Phase I of the sanitation project will cover 800 toilets in Huskur Gram Panchayat, Anekal Taluk, Karnataka. 220 toilets have already been built, and the project is to be completed by August 2008.

Dismaying statistics reveal that almost 80% of India’s one billion plus population do not have access to basic sanitation. Lack of proper sanitation and poor hygiene practices are the leading causes of infectious diarrhoea. 17% of under-five deaths are attributable to diarrhoeal diseases, making it the largest killer of children after pneumonia. Diarrhoea is also a major contributor to malnutrition and stunting.

Read More: Financial Express, 24 May 2008

PATNA: Around 300 special ‘eco-sanitation toilets’ are to be constructed before the rainy season in flood-prone areas of Bihar in a bid to prevent spread of water-borne diseases so common at that time in the state. (…)

Read all: Economic Times, 21 May 2008

Shimla:Though the total rural sanitation program was launched late in the hill state but it had bettered the national average in targets achieved. Deva Singh Negi, a government administrator of the program speaking at a World Bank sponsored workshop today stated this and added that the rural development department had a Rs 101 crore budget, spread out over four years for providing rural access to toilets to all by 2012.

Read all: myHimachal, 20 May 2008

A two day long National Workshop Workshop on Sustainable Sanitation as an initiative began on 19 May 2008 with a clarion call to assess the resources, identify the needs, and address sector specific intervention to meet the infrastructure and human resource requirement on hygiene education, community mobilization and behavior change programme. Organised by the Department of Drinking Water Supply (DDWS), Ministry of Rural Development, this workshop is in response to declaration of International Year of Sanitation by UN General Assembly. (…)

Read all: Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India

Jalilpur (Chandauli), May 12. In the era of gram pradhans owning palatial houses and zipping in snazzy MUVs, the head of this village lives in a rented house. And despite international renown, he has not even a cycle of his own.

Sri Prakash Singh (51) is a clutter-buster. Not just of this village 15 kms from Varanasi, but also for experts in at least 20 countries. And he is responsible for ushering in a revolution of total cleanliness and sanitation.

A science graduate, he has made Jalilpur of Chandauli globally famous by ensuring that every village in the house has a toilet.

Read More - expressindia

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, India, revealed in an interview published in April 2008 in the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) “Water Champion” series, that his organisation plans to open branches in 50 countries. Sulabh has already constructed and is maintaining public toilets in Afghanistan and Bhutan and has provided training to professionals in 15 African countries, Dr. Pathak said. Other plans include publishing Sulabh literature in all the 22 languages of India, and distributing 5 books each to 600,000 villages.

Sulabh International is well known for pioneering the “Sulabh Shauchalaya”, a self-composting two-pit, pour-flush toilet, and for liberating scavengers or “night soil workers”.

By Sandra Bisin

TAKHTBAI, Pakistan, 5 May 2008 – In the remote town of Takhtbai in the North West Frontier Province, people took to the streets recently in a march to raise awareness during Pakistan’s biannual Child Health and Sanitation Week.

In the course of the week, events to reduce child deaths and disease by promoting better health, sanitation and hygiene practices were launched in six districts across the country. (…)

Read all UNICEF Press Release

NEW DELHI: India continues to have the world’s highest number of polio cases this year, with the disease having crippled more children till April than it did during the same period in 2007.

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The children who got polio despite multiple doses, did not get enough number of doses to develop adequate protection to polio virus,” a health ministry official said. According to experts, children living in areas with poor environmental sanitation and high population density, like the endemic districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, need higher doses of polio vaccine to be adequately protected against the virus as they are more frequently exposed to polio virus under these circumstances.

Read More: Times of India, 2 May 2008

More than three weeks after Cyclone Nargis tore across Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta, assessments still place the provision of clean water as one of the top priorities for survivors.

The International Federation, in close cooperation with the Myanmar Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) continues to explore ways of trying to meet these needs.

An ICRC water purification unit was deployed to Dedaye, a town in the delta, on 21 May, manned by five Myanmar Red Cross volunteers. The unit has been set up and has started to produce 72,000 litres of water a day.

Read More - ReliefWeb

Cyclone Nargis destroyed not only houses and killed people and livestock. The storm also devastated toilets.

So what? There are other priorities, aren’t there? Food, shelter and clean water are what aid agencies emphasize. But human excrement is a weapon of mass destruction. A gram of human feces can contain up to 10 million viruses. At least 50 communicable diseases — including cholera, meningitis and typhoid — travel from host to host in human excrement.

The priority is containment. That’s as fancy as it sounds: With the water table only 20 centimeters below the surface in Myanmar, it is little use to dig pit latrines, so buckets or tanks for human waste are needed instead. Providing such things is made harder by the refusal of Myanmar’s government to accept help. And it is also hampered by our unwillingness to even talk about it.

Humanitarian aid agencies use the shorthand “watsan” to stand for “water and sanitation.” There’s a reason those two words aren’t in alphabetical order, and it’s not poetry. When it comes to prioritizing aid, water has always received the lion’s share of attention and money.

Read more - Rose George, NYTimes.com