Toilets: India
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Households without Latrines: India
Stats affirm PM's stress on toilets
TIMES INSIGHT GROUP
The Times of India Aug 16 2014
53% Of All Indian Households Do Not Have Latrines, Figure 69% In Villages
Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out how women often have to wait for the cover of darkness to go out to defecate or urinate because they don't have toilets at home. He also pointed out that the absence of separate toilets for girls was one of the factors behind their dropping out of school. So exactly how bad is the situation on the ground? The Times of India checked out the official numbers and they paint a grim picture.
Data from census 2011 shows that over 53% of all Indian households do not have a latrine within their premises.
In the rural areas, this figure is as high as 69.3%, that is more than two-thirds, and even in urban areas it is a substantial 18.6% or nearly one in every five.
These all-India figures do not quite reveal the full hor ror. There are states where the situation in much worse. Of the nine states in which over half the households don't have a latrine at home, there are four -Jharkhand (78%), Odisha (78%), Bihar (76.9%) and Chhattisgarh (75.4%) -in which three-quarters or more of homes have no latrines. But it isn't just these `backward' states where the picture is so grim. Even in Tamil Nadu (51.7%) and Andhra Pradesh (50.4%) a majority of homes lack latrines.
The figure for the PM's own home state, Gujarat, is only a little better at 42.7%.
In the rural areas, there are nine states in which over three-fourths of homes do not have a latrine. While these, not surprisingly include some of the states mentioned earlier, what might come as a shock is that in Tamil Nadu 76.8% of homes do not have latrines on the premises. In Gujarat, that's true of 67% or over twothirds of homes.
The situation in terms of schools having separate toi lets for girls is distinctly better, with the latest data from the District Information System for Education (DISE) showing that in 2013-14, only 8.4% of all schools did not have functional ones. However, here too some states are quite worse off. All told, there are 12 states in which 10% or more of schools do not have functional girls' toilets. These include small north-eastern states but they also have among them big states like Andhra Pradesh (28.3% with no functional girls' toilet), Odisha (24.8%), Bihar (17.5%) and West Bengal (15.2%).
