On Poverty and Sanitation

Abolishing poverty begins in the mind. Infrastructure alone is not enough.

by Heather Denigan
August 7, 2014

Clean water and sanitation are rare in India — but perhaps sadder still, many of India's people still don’t understand their urgency. Death and disease have been their way of life for centuries — millennia even. Government benevolence has created a surplus of unused facilities while its people don’t understand what they’re for or why they’re important.

The Indian government hopes for the country’s “total sanitization” by the 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi in 2019, according to a story from Bloomberg — “India’s Toilet Race Failing as Villages Don’t Use Them". One woman tells the writer her opinion on latrines: '“Locking us inside these booths with our own filth? I will never see how that is clean. . . Going out there is normal,” she says, indicating a nearby field.

We can make a political point, an economic point, and a philosophical point here. Human flourishing isn’t normal — just look at the rates for polio, rape, diarrhea, viruses, and cholera in Ind…