UNITED NATIONS, Nov 13: Life-saving investments in water and sanitation are dwarfed by military spending in most developing nations, says a United Nations report. In Ethiopia, the military budget is 10 times the water and sanitation budget — in Pakistan, 47 times.
The annual report of UN Development programme notes that Pakistan's military budget was 47 per cent more than its spending on clean water and sanitation projects that could help reduce childhood deaths and boost development.
It observed that the lack of access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation killed nearly two million children worldwide each year. This amounted to nearly 5,000 deaths per day, most of them preventable, and made diarrhoea the second biggest childhood killer.
It said the flush toilet, taken for granted in most rich countries, could be a cheap but powerful tool to protect children's lives.
It added that two out of three people in South Asia lack basic sanitation, numbers that put the region on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.
''No access to sanitation is a polite way of saying that people draw water for drinking, cooking and washing from rivers, lakes, ditches and drains fouled with human and animal excrement,'' said Kevin Watkins, the report’s author.
''The toilet may seem an unlikely catalyst for human development, but the report provides abundant and powerful evidence to show how it benefits people's wellbeing,'' he said.
The report, ''Beyond scarcity: Power, politics and the global water crisis'' painted a grim picture of global imbalances and the low political priority accorded to safe drinking water and sanitation.
''Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people,'' it said.
KARACHI: The report notes that some of the most innovative efforts to expand the availability of latrines and simple sewerage systems have occurred in South Asia.
In Karachi, a local group began organising slum dwellers lane by lane in 1980 to build sewer channels to collect waste from their homes. Entire neighbourhoods then collaborated to construct larger channels, and the city eventually agreed to finance a trunk sewer line. The infant mortality rate in the slum, Orangi, has fallen to 40 deaths per 1,000 births, from 130 in the early 1980s.
The report cited Peruvian studies that the installation of a flush toilet in the home increased by almost 60 per cent the chances of a child surviving to the first birthday and in Egypt by 57 per cent.
