India's Septic Problem - NYTimes.com Some good sanitation news, discussed in a Nature commentary this week, is that some 80 percent of India's urban residents now have access to a toilet. The bad news is that only a third of India's urban households with a toilet have a connection to a sewage pipe network, and not all of those networks go to a sewage treatment plant. Please read Jim Yardley's report today from Mumbai for one consequence of the sanitation gap. It's no wonder, writes the author, Sunita Narain, that the country still suffers from extremely high rates of water-borne disease. Narain is the director general of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi and author of a new two-volume book, "Excreta Matters: How Urban India is Soaking up Water, Polluting Rivers and Drowning in its Own Waste." She calls for a design revolution, given how the current slow effort to build out a western-style sanitation system requiring enormous amounts of water and energy is not tenable, particularly for the poor. Happily the essay is outside the subscription wall of the journal. Here's an excerpt and a link to the rest: Rapidly-modernizing India is drowning in its own excreta. According to the World Health Organization, more than 600 million Indians practise open defecation - making up 60% of the 1.1 billion people who do so worldwide. But even as toilets get built, the challenge of managing excreta grows.... City planners worry more about supplying water to their citizens than about the waste water generated. Yet the effluent inevitably goes into streams, lakes and rivers, or seeps into the ground to contaminate drinking water. Nitrate levels in groundwater across India exceed 45 milligrams per litre - a sure sign of sewage contamination3. Leaked sewage leads to a deadly and costly spiral. As surface or groundwater gets contaminated, the city must source clean water from farther afield. The cost of pumping water rises - it now accounts for 30-50% of the price of supplying water. The cost of building and maintaining pipelines increases. And if the network is not maintained, water is lost - 30-50% of the water leaks. The nation therefore has less clean water to supply and needs to pay more to get it to the people. It cannot provide these services for everyone, and it chooses the rich. As the water system degrades, the rich move to bottled water. The poor get sick.... Governments must demand change in how water and waste are managed.... The challenge for science is to look beyond the modern engineering mindset. We know that current technologies, which use large amounts of clean water to transport small amounts of excreta through expensive pipes to costly treatment plants, are unworkable and unaffordable in much of the world. Yet toilets and sewage disposal are among the least researched technologies. Please read the rest. The science academies of the world's most prosperous countries agree, in theory. Can they translate that stated priority into a science and technology push in service of the 2.6 billion people with no sanitary place to defecate? There's more on India's sewage/water problems on the Latitudes blog. The underlying issues are uncomfortable to discuss, but deeply consequential if not addressed. As the kids in this Unicef video understand, poop can be funny, but also fatal: