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India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

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Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#271

Post by redsummer »

dang wrote: post #240
redsummer wrote: post #126

Hinduism is a big problem. The Ganges is literally a river of shit - it has 120 times the safe level of fecal matter. Yet Hindus regard it as purifying and it's considered holy to have a dip in it. When you have a culture like that, it's going to be hard to persuade people to not shit in the water they drink.

You've been violating the HN guidelines so frequently and posting so uncivilly (e.g. religious and racial flamewars) that we've banned this account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that this won't happen in the future. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14205447 and marked it off-topic.

I don't accept your characterisation. I am just speaking plainly.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#272

Post by rajeshwadhwani »

jdietrich wrote: post #267
mjevans wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a case for bending the truth. Find out how to explain it in their existing culture. Curses, uncleanness, etc. There's probably SOMETHING responsible for misfortune, death, and disease. Claim that there is a method which helps battle this, it involves purifying the water with a strong fire for this duration of an hour-glass. Once it is cooled it is, for a short time, safe to use.

Tell the truth, but dress it in marketing. Use the same tricks that advertisers use to sell damned near everything to damned near everyone. Shitting in the river will make you sick, but it's also the low-class thing to do, it's unfashionable, it's unattractive to the opposite sex, it makes you look foolish. Toilets are respectable, they're modern, they're stylish, they're a status symbol. You don't have to invoke sup…

I am particularly hooked on this idea.Distributing free low concentrated sugar free tea :-) I remember a case study i read some years ago about the difference in drinking culture between india and china.The Chinese factory workers often have a 24 hour boiling pot of low concentrated green tea parked where they constantly consume small portions of during their day.AFI remember around 70% of water intake for them was via this medium. That could be an out of the box solution.:-)

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#273

Post by bildung »

tomaskafka wrote: post #237
avar wrote: post #16

> 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. 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. It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were…

Check out how we, the 'wise modern civilization' splash all our chemicals and shit into the rivers and oceans, and then eat fish from there. I bet we will be looked at as 'these savage guys were totally dumb, look at them, it's unbelievable' about 50 - 150 years later. Also, you americans take away your babies from your mothers after few weeks, putting them to a cold hearted institutions, making them frustrated for l…

> Also, you americans take away your babies from your mothers after few weeks, putting them to a cold hearted institutions, making them frustrated for life? In exchange for what, extra 1 % of GDP from working mothers? That's a pretty bad deal I must say.

> Most people in Europe would see this as a barbaric practice, as we know children need a close contact with parents till at least 2.5 years (don't you study developmental psychology there?), and our social systems support that.

I am from Europe, and have studied developmental psychology, and I can assure you that there is no empirical evidence for your claims of daycare hurting development of children. Quality of parentchild bonding does not correlate with children's age when entering daycare.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#274

Post by eru »

graycat wrote: post #187
eru wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether your setup could be made to work with a higher population density?

Probably not much higher without some significant changes. But the main idea of a septic tank is to have the bacteria eat everything objectionable, give off CO2 and methane, leave a little sludge (after 20+ years, I've never had the septic tank cleaned), and those are also the main ideas for sewage treatment if have big sewer pipes, bring all that stuff to a central location, and treat it there. As far as I can tell,…

> But the main idea of a septic tank is to have the bacteria eat everything objectionable, [...]

Isn't that the main idea behind wastewater treatment everywhere anyway already? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage_treatment and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wastewater_treatment

Also compare Tree bogs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_bog) which is about not mixing water and human waste in the first place. Human waste can go directly on a compost heap, and the rest of the water is easier to treat.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#275

Post by stuaxo »

jdietrich wrote: post #263
abandonliberty wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an area for innovation. Managing change/altering beliefs are extremely difficult. To help iron deficiency in Cambodians, they were encouraged to cook with iron ingots. No one used them. So they shaped the ingot into a lotus flower. Dice. Cultural investigation showed that fish were symbols of luck, health, and happiness. Fish-shaped ingots worked out! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_iron_fish

Rory Sutherland often makes the point that advertising agencies are uniquely equipped to solve many complex social problems. They are, by some considerable margin, the best in the world at persuasion and behavioural change. The minds that persuaded a billion people to smoke cigarettes are well equipped to persuade people to dig proper latrines and wash their hands. The medical and logistical response to the recent eb…

Making advertising agencies useful for something ? This would be great.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#276

Post by bane »

EGreg wrote: post #137
eru wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone ever do that?

Victorian English drank that shit https://www.google.com/amp/pictorial.jezebel.com/some-fun-na...

There's a pretty good show on life during the era, one of the jobs they feature is people scowering the shit in the streets to find dog shit because it has different useful properties than horse shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjBywdLcgI&list=PL72jhKwank...

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#277

Post by joyofdata »

tomaskafka wrote: post #237
avar wrote: post #16

> 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. 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. It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were…

Check out how we, the 'wise modern civilization' splash all our chemicals and shit into the rivers and oceans, and then eat fish from there. I bet we will be looked at as 'these savage guys were totally dumb, look at them, it's unbelievable' about 50 - 150 years later. Also, you americans take away your babies from your mothers after few weeks, putting them to a cold hearted institutions, making them frustrated for l…

Very good analogy!

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#278

Post by ryanar »

bildung wrote: post #273
tomaskafka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out how we, the 'wise modern civilization' splash all our chemicals and shit into the rivers and oceans, and then eat fish from there. I bet we will be looked at as 'these savage guys were totally dumb, look at them, it's unbelievable' about 50 - 150 years later. Also, you americans take away your babies from your mothers after few weeks, putting them to a cold hearted institutions, making them frustrated for l…

> Also, you americans take away your babies from your mothers after few weeks, putting them to a cold hearted institutions, making them frustrated for life? In exchange for what, extra 1 % of GDP from working mothers? That's a pretty bad deal I must say. > Most people in Europe would see this as a barbaric practice, as we know children need a close contact with parents till at least 2.5 years (don't you study develop…

The attachment relationship cam be affected by daycare if the promary caregiver becomes the people in daycare.

A childs temperament settles after 3 and imo 0-3 is a critical period for bonding with the parent.

I would suggest a healthy mix of some daycare and some stay at home parenting, so the child can better socialize with other children and learn from them, but also grow a secure attachment to their parent and observe the adult world, not just what other children do.

Bowlby's attachment theory ref https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.psychologistworld.c...

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#279

Post by klibertp »

burkaman wrote: post #97
thowbit9 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because learning makes people less stupid in our part of the world.

They literally don't have a toilet. Are they going to conjure one if they become smart enough? I understand there's an issue of people not using them once they have one, but step one is getting a toilet, and step two is educating people enough to want to use them.

> They literally don't have a toilet. Are they going to conjure one if they become smart enough?

Yes, exactly! Do you know what "smart" (or rather, appropriately educated, which higher literacy helps) people can do? They can build things. They can design systems more complex than the default "shit -> river" and execute them. And have them working for years.

So yes, education is the problem. There are many DIY solutions people could use for themselves, on a small, local scale, if they had access to the information on how to do them. On a larger scale, say of a village, there are many infrastructural projects which could be done with just several people and a bit of knowledge. And everything above that is what governments specialize in.

Giving people toilets will solve nothing. Even if they will use them for a bit, they will shortly turn into smelly shitholes, worse than outdoors by far.

Instead, if they build the toilets themselves, there is a higher chance for them to maintain them. And they could be building their own toilets right now if not for illiteracy and lack of any education.

I know there are other problems: economical situation, ingrained traditions and so on. But education is the only way of battling these problems as well.

Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

#280

Post by rajitdasgupta »

I'd say take this data with a healthy pinch of salt. I have friends currently working in conjunction with the Health and Sanitation department who say that the ground reality is very different.

As someone else noted in another thread, toilet maintenance and water availability continue to remain a very real problem.

The dashboard data reflects only the number of new toilets being built (and their corresponding 'expected' coverage). This doesn't take into account how many of them are actually being used as toilets.

In some districts in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, less than 1 out of 15 households actually use the newly built toilets. Elsewhere, they have already been converted into mini-grocery stores and storage facilities. All these instances are being conveniently ignored.

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