BATHROOMS IN INDIA

2008-07-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

BATHROOMS IN INDIA

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister of India

Dr. Manmohan Singh, Ph.D.
Prime Minister of India

Dear Sir,

I read it somewhere. Around 700 million Indians relieve themselves out in the open, not in a toilet. They do it along the railroad tracks, by the roadside or out in agricultural fields.

Estimating two pounds per person per day it adds up to 1.4 billion pounds of human fecal matter deposited on ground every day. With the rain, this huge pile of toxins, germs, bacteria and viruses moves right into the sources of fresh water supply and contaminates them.

A greater misfortune is that the lucky 300 million Indians, who enjoy the luxury of the privacy of a bathroom, are not doing any better either. Even their waste, solid or liquid, is either deposited on the ground or is discharged untreated into the rivers and streams.

This should add up to two billion pounds of human fecal matter and a billion gallons of liquid human waste getting mixed with the Indian water supply every day.

Over a year, the figures would build up to 700 billion pounds and 365 billion gallons respectively.

I read this in New York Times. The city of Delhi draws 250 million gallons of drinking water from Yamuna every day. That is fine. However, Delhi pays the river back with 950 million gallons of raw, untreated sewage every day. What a payback to a source of life.

Starting from Mohanchand Karamchand Gandhi and Pundit Jawahir La’al Nehru until today with you, Dr. Manmohan Singh, Ph.D., as the prime minister of India, we have a fairly long list of leaders who all went to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard and other great academic institutions.

What else is common among them?

They all relieved themselves in Holy Yamuna, of course, through a probably marbled bathroom at 10 Safdar Jang Road, or somewhere around it.

It is really hard to imagine a gentleman with a doctorate in economics, with the job of caring for a billion people, to be defecating and urinating in the once pristine waters of Yamuna and never stopping for a minute to think: “Shit! What the hell am I doing?”

The fact of the matter is that this is still not something to cry over or, to lament about. Building bathrooms and sewage water treatment plants in India is a great window of opportunity. It is an immense business prospect. It would be the greatest single construction project in the history of mankind with the greatest positive impact on the health of the Indian water supply.

Just look at the numbers. If you want a bathroom for every seven free-going Indians, you would need to build100 million bathrooms across India. Imagine, how big and how frenzied an economic activity you would be setting off.

On the second thought, you do not have to imagine. You have a doctorate in economics. You have a mind trained in these matters. All you have to do is tabulate. Pick up that calculator sitting on your desk and start punching the keys.

To build a bathroom you need cement, sand, gravel, bricks, steel, a door, doorknobs, paint, a toilet seat, a commode, a wash basin, faucets, water pipes, drain pipes, a flush tank, an exhaust system, electrical wire, switches, bulbs and sockets and many other things. You just multiply it on that little calculator of yours with one hundred million and you would have a set of mind-boggling numbers in front of you.

Imagine the Indian manufacturers and suppliers running their plants and systems to the capacity to meet this huge new demand. Think of the logistics involved. What a great boost it would be to the Indian industry and economy. How many new jobs would be created just in this sector of the economy?

Then there would be the workers engaged in the real construction activity. There would be architects, civil engineers, electricians, plumbers, masons, painters and raw laborers in millions needed to complete the job in a certain amount of time. Yes, we are talking about millions of new jobs created overnight with just this one project.

Then imagine a huge sewage water treatment plant processing 950 million gallons of Delhi waste a day into something less harmful, may be recyclable. Imagine a sewage treatment plant like this for every one of the thousands of big and small towns of India. Then you would be able to visualize the rivers of India flowing through clean once again, in peace.

With that doctorate of yours, you have the required knowledge and skill to put this gigantic plan together yourself. The resources, you have at your fingertips. You are the Prime Minister of India.

Cut that national defense budget of yours in half and use that money for this bathroom project. Who do you think is going to attack India? China? Pakistan? Me? I don’t want to attack and occupy a country where the rivers are running literally full of shit. Who else would?

Once the rivers are free of this contamination, the incidence rate of water-carried diseases would drop precipitously and you would get your money back in the form of savings in health expenditure.

Cut that national nuclear budget of yours in half and use that money to give your fellow Indians the dignity of a bathroom. That nuclear waste is way much harder to get rid of than the human refuse. You sure don’t want that. The age of windmill power generation has already arrived.

More than 350 years ago, the mad Mogul Shah Jahan robbed the national treasury to the walls to build a personal monument to his dead wife.

Today, it is your turn to build a Taj Mahal of privacy and dignity for every living Indian man, woman and child, build it in a way that it lasts as long as the Taj has lasted and, at the same time, save the rivers of India.

Thanks.

See you.

Syed Fareedullah Hussaini

My Inconvenient Opinion

BATHROOMS IN INDIA