Dear Ayres, Thank you for neatly explaining via a You Tube the status of open defecation in Goa. You have thereby demonstrated your concern for the common man and also exposed the lies of the BJP babus running Goa who claim that Goa is open defecation free. You point out that labourers (mostly from Yogi's UP perhaps?) freely relieve themselves in any available open space and that Indian bus tourists signal their arrival by urinating near the bus stand. People like these have no choice as there are no public toilets and the few that have been built are poorly maintained. Perhaps Indian culture in general & Hindu ways in particular have never prioritised sanitation and cleanliness in their scheme of values. A few years ago, the Economic & Political Weekly pointed out the perils of defecating in open spaces. Here are excerpts:
A Reportusing data compiled by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) claimed that scores ofchildren simply “disappeared” from a slum on New Delhi’s outskirts after theystepped out in the open to defecate. In thecourse of 16 months, between December 2013 and March 2015, as many as 171children were missing from the Shahbad Dairy slum in outer Delhi. Of these 66remain untraced. The common link in the story was that their parents had sentthem to the nearby forest to defecate because there was no toilet in the slumwith around 500 households. Of the 171 missing, five had been killed, 45 girlshad been raped or sexually assaulted. The story is achilling reminder that the crisis of sanitation can be a matter of life and death for the mostvulnerable. One in every two Indians continues to defecate in the open. Theprice for the lack of toilets is paid not just by women, who are oftenattacked, molested, raped and shamed, but also by children who are sent outunaccompanied to defecate in the open. Not only was the Shahbad Dairy slumwithout a single toilet, there was no toilet within a two kilometre radius.After the disappearances, parents stopped feeding their children any food aftersunset.Read more: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/25/editorials/raising-stink.html Eddie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Wednesday, 4 September 2019 13:11:26 BST, Aires Rodrigues <airesrodrigu...@gmail.com> wrote: https://youtu.be/XGVWXEl5VoQ
