42 per cent of Indian children are malnourished. Shame, said the Supreme Court, that despite the Right to Education, thousands of children, and particularly girls, are dropping out of school because there are no toilets. Shame, said Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister for Rural Development, calling the absence of sanitation “the biggest blot on the human development portfolio in India.”
Yes, the lack of sanitation, the fact that one of out every two Indians is forced to defecate in the open, is a very good reason why we as a nation should be ashamed. Ramesh acknowledges that out of six lakh villages in India, hardly 25,000 are free from open defecation.
