http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/indias-democracy-struggles-with-education-and-sanitation/19644433
Despite the progress India has made regarding sanitation, health care and education, there are still many Indians who suffer daily without basic human essentials. This is mainly due to India’s large population, consisting of 1.2 billion people. Although India’s poverty level has been reduced, maternal health and sanitation remain poor, with no concrete plan of attacking these issues.
Shocking statistics show that India has the highest number of people without proper toilets as well as the highest number of pregnant women dying during childbirth. As for education, only 12.4% of 220 million school-going children advance on to higher education.
The government intends to increase this rate to 20.0% by 2020 by investing $60 billion for education in the next three years. Yet, in order to this to be plausible, this would require tripling the share of India’s GDP devoted to education.
Although India’s economy is growing, their government needs to put more emphasis on the important social issues at hand. In fact, by taking care of their country’s social needs, it may even result in economic growth. Major companies, who express interest in investing in the country, end up backing away once they realize India’s inability to provide basic sanitation needs and education to its people.
It seems to me that India’s government is putting too much focus on their economic growth, and is dismissing the social needs of its country. Instead, they need to utilize their economic growth for good and form concrete, plausible plans to reduce these health, sanitation and educational issues at bay.
Indeed, providing social services and adequate infrastructure to its citizens is a mandate for the Indian government. One of the crucial issues for materialization is of course funding. That is probably why the Indian government focuses on its economic growth.
ReplyDeleteFrom my experiences in rural development projects in Asian countries, TOILET was always a big issue. In rural areas, sewage is non-existent, meaning flash toilet is out of question. We thought privy type toilet is better than NO-toilet at all. However, village people asked us: Who is going to collect the human waste accumulated in toilets? There is no vacuum car. Even if you provide us vacuum car/s, who would pay for gas and drivers? And where can they take collected human wastes? There is no sanitation facility. A simple proposal of building toilets in one village (we thought it would contribute to their health condition) revealed numerous problems the village is facing.