India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
<p><pre><code>    > Unfortunately, in many places, it’s not
    > feasible to lay down sewer pipes or build
    > treatment facilities. [...] But giving
    > people access to toilets isn’t enough. You
    > also have to persuade them to use the
    > toilets.
</code></pre>
I can't find it now, but there was a news video making the rounds a year or two ago that showed that this problem is much more fundamental than that.<p>It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were falling ill because they were literally taking a shit in the same river that they were getting their drinking water from, just a few meters away.<p>These people all knew each other, and even if they didn't have any toilets or basic infrastructure I would have thought that something as basic as "if you shit where you drink, you get cholera" would be common knowledge anywhere in the world by now.<p>Of course it would have been nice for those people to have sewer pipes, toilets etc. But in that case the problem could have been solved with a few shovels, and a marked area indicating where you should be going to do your business, preferable in some open field far from the drinking water.<p>For those people toilets would be nice, but unnecessary. They clearly all have a shared interest in not drinking each other's shit. If by some magic they aren't aware that mixing shit with water leads to bad consequences that seemed to be solvable by some one-time government presentation on the consequences of them keeping doing what they were doing.<p>But somehow the problem persists, it's unbelievable.