81–90 of 303 posts
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Who is Narendra Modi? Edit:- read the article.thanks...
Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. He has a very interesting (and controversial) history. He grew up selling tea at a railway station and now he's Prime Minister of the largest democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi
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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've heard plenty of anecdotes from this decade that toddlers in rural China commonly poop onto the street, and that public toilets on e.g. buses are too messy to be hygienic. It seems to be common enough: https://www.quora.com/Chinese-Etiquette-and-Behavior-Is-poop... Better than doing it in one's own drinking water, but I think what saves the Chinese is not education, but a tradition of cooking absolutely everythin…
In downtown Shanghai I got to watch a mother walk out of her business holding her child, have the child crap on the sidewalk (while being held in the mothers' arms), and then brought back inside. This was not a baby. The kid looked about 3-4 years old.
This goes on in subway stations as well. The parent has the kid sit on the edge of a garbage can and crap into it.
If you go you'll see the children commonly wear these lower garments with the whole groin area open. It's so the child can squat and pee or poo anywhere without needing adult attention. The child is taken to public parts in the city and around downtown like this.
Chinese public conscientiousness is far below anything you can imagine until you experience it.
This 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?
> 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…
The first or second chapter of Diffusion of Innovation covers a case where a health organization official tried to convince people to boil their water. No one did it. The concept of "germs" was so foreign to them, and their beliefs about water were already so ingrained. It was a complete failure. It seems obvious to say "if you drink dirty water you will get sick" but you're assuming that people can make so many conn…
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.
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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.
Don't mix up "Romans" and "Europeans." A better question is if the residents of Rome and other cities that had public facilities went back to the bucket or if they continued to use and maintain the public toilets. The rest of Europe likely never had public facilities to begin with, and the fall of the Empire might have delayed that technology transfer I suspect.
It's outlined in the article, but I think it's worth saying again: the most difficult part of what they're doing seems to be getting people to change their habits. It's the same psychology involved in pollution and climate change. Because people don't see an immediate reaction to for instance plastic-pollution, it's harder to get them to understand the serious effects that it is having.
Yeah they're doing great work but I've actually met people who told us they didn't want to use the toilets because they couldn't "build up the pressure" in the cramped space since they are used to the open fields since decades. This is going to take a long time but they're actually doing a pretty good job at installing toilets that's for sure.
That's true for modern humans too -- without the phone, they can't build up the pressure.
> 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…
The first or second chapter of Diffusion of Innovation covers a case where a health organization official tried to convince people to boil their water. No one did it. The concept of "germs" was so foreign to them, and their beliefs about water were already so ingrained. It was a complete failure. It seems obvious to say "if you drink dirty water you will get sick" but you're assuming that people can make so many conn…
Though that as a kid, I was educated as to what happens when you drink unclean water or food made at the road side.
There were a lot of educational shows that aired on a channel named Doordarshan. That channel was free and you were able to watch it even without having a cable connection.
The educational/scientific shows aired around 10 AM to 12 PM the time after which most kids started school. So it would happen that I was getting ready for school and learning about all this shit; pun intended.
I never drank water from a shitty source ever again. Never left water in a bucket outside as it leads to creation of mosquitoes etc.
I must admit though, it is not enough. I also remember government officials coming to my grandfather's village where they educated about how mosquitoes are born in stationary water.
I think one of the best thing to do is, give some sort of a portable microscope to these officials, that can let people take the water they drink and observe the microscopic bacteria - or lack thereof - in their water. Even someone who is uneducated or does not know of scientific method will reason with what they see themselves.
Edit: Remove colloquial/useless words and grammar changes.
So the basic problem is Indian toilet tech and the whole process has not been evolved. In Western world and especially places like Japan, there are lots of people working on innovations in this area and things keep improving. In India, this area is considered to be assigned to lowest members of social cast system and thinking about it or working on it by intellectuals is considered taboo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first or second chapter of Diffusion of Innovation covers a case where a health organization official tried to convince people to boil their water. No one did it. The concept of "germs" was so foreign to them, and their beliefs about water were already so ingrained. It was a complete failure. It seems obvious to say "if you drink dirty water you will get sick" but you're assuming that people can make so many conn…
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.
But in their case water being boiled was something you did when you were sick. This already had them boiling water for sick people, the sick would get better (to some extent confirming their belief), and they'd go back to cold dirty water.
Earlier 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.
Don't mix up "Romans" and "Europeans." A better question is if the residents of Rome and other cities that had public facilities went back to the bucket or if they continued to use and maintain the public toilets. The rest of Europe likely never had public facilities to begin with, and the fall of the Empire might have delayed that technology transfer I suspect.
I think they went back to using lower-level solutions because of the collapse as dimitar mentioned.