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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
#62This has nothing to do with building toilets. Its with education. The northern parts of India has very low literacy rate. High literacy + HDI states like Kerala and Meghalaya was already clean. The dashboard of 2014 data proves that.
If you don't have a toilet, how does learning how to read help you not poop in the open?
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#63Narendra Modi, a person who can change things in India.. Because he knows Sankhya.
That's not a very helpful comment considering that most people on this forum wouldn't be familiar with that concept. For those trying to decipher this, he's referring to a school of philosophy.
It's quite silly to say that anyway, because a person's thoughts on philosophy rarely predict how good they would be at passing legislation and working with bureaucracy.
> Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
> George R R Martin
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, it doesn't appear to be their intention to fuck up education though. They tried to fund smaller classes but it ended up not improving performance and made schools more costly over the long term, (crappy instructors/hiring policies were likely the root cause of the failure, and then those new small schools didn't provide a good ror on the money invested vs other projects) So then they tried to improve teacher qua…
> Hmm, it doesn't appear to be their intention to fuck up education though. I agree the Gates Foundation does not intend to screw up public education.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#65> 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…
Agreed, this is quite baffling. The only answer I can think of is that India hasn't been prioritizing education in rural communities. Population is not a valid excuse: do people still shit where they drink in China? I'm more understanding when it comes to the lack of basic sanitation facilities, but lack of education is inexcusable in this day and age!
China used night soil as fertilizer historically; they don't anymore (when was the practice abandoned, I wonder? And is there any Chinese interest in terra preta?), but it got them into great habits. The same is true for at least Korea and Japan; I don't know as much about Southeast Asia.
Only drinking hot drinks also helped China's health. Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, discusses this in passing; even 17th-century observers felt that it would be better for the Spanish colonials to adopt Chinese practice in the Philippines rather than keeping their custom of drinking everything iced. (Where did they get the ice?) Braudel also mentions a case where St. Francis Xavier drank a cup of cold water, to the horror of his Chinese entourage, who warned him not to keep up such a dangerous practice...
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how long it took for westerners to stop throwing their "night soil" out the window and start installing and using toilets. What always struck me as strange is that the Romans had and used public toilets, but afterwards Europe went back to shitting in a bucket and throwing it out the window. Puzzling.
I seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen...
> I seem to remember that Roman toilets were often in the kitchen...
Not unusual for buildings in Europe or the US built around the turn of the last century either.
These days, they're typically renovated so that there's a wall in between and the bathroom door leads off of an incredibly narrow kitchen, but a hundred years ago, those were in the same room.
(And those were the ones who were lucky, because they actually had a private bathroom).
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#67and yet Bill is completely fucking up public education in the US.
I'm not sure I understand what this is in reference to. Mind providing some more details? I'm genuinely curious.
They've literally had zero success reforming education and figured the best way to rectify that would be to lobby to bring that zero success to the entire country. For someone who believes in evidence based policy(and bonuses for teachers), this is such a fucking failure there's no other way to put it.
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#68> 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…
Agreed, this is quite baffling. The only answer I can think of is that India hasn't been prioritizing education in rural communities. Population is not a valid excuse: do people still shit where they drink in China? I'm more understanding when it comes to the lack of basic sanitation facilities, but lack of education is inexcusable in this day and age!
I'm currently reading a reprint of a 110 year old book about how China and Japan have kept their farms fertile for 4000 years.
The basics are lots of elbow grease, and continuous application of river silt and (aged?) animal and human sewage.
It occurs to me that this book predates both industrialization (factory effluent) and the last cholera outbreaks. Which makes me wonder what sort of sweeping agricultural practice changes came in subsequent decades.
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#69Two of the most forward thinking folks I believe are Bill Gates and Elon Musk. While Elon wants to carve way into science fiction, Bill wants to ensure no one gets left behind. Exciting time to be alive. In this case big kudos goes to Narendra Modi and the Indian govt to ensure this happens. I believe such fundamental things are the most effective when govt pushes for it rather than individuals.
You can't carve away at science fiction without the human capital to do the science. Lifting huge populations out of disease and poverty is going to have a larger effect on scientific progress than spending money on directing the few who can do science right now.
I agree with the sentiment and some aspects of science, like medical trials, may scale fairly well.
However the most significant scientific discoveries seem to come from the top of the pile. You need to be in the right place and time with the right background to make the right connections that reveal a previously hidden truth.
Science is about seeing something that's staring you in the face but nobody has even noticed before. That generally can't be farmed out.
So it's a long road from poverty to understanding to discovering something really new.
Re: India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste
#70> 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…
> It showed a Indians in a tiny village who were falling ill because they were literally taking a shit in the same river that they were getting their drinking water from, just a few meters away.
Take the western media's portrayal of India's poverty with a little grain of salt. India is very poor and I lived in a village where people use to shit in open but then there is something like "poverty porn" that western media often engages in to get more eyeballs.
In rural areas open shitting has its own unwritten rules. You shit far from water sources, temples and other places where people gather. You shit away from water wells. Sick people shit in a separate area.
People do shit at riverside because easy availability of water but it is essentially tragedy of commons issue and it was very common to beatup people who took a dump near potable water sources.