Health issues in India
On World Toilet Day, United Nations figures on open defecation and toilets across the world should ring alarm bells. Four billion people still lack access to basic sanitation facilities. Each day, nearly a thousand children are dying due to preventable water and sanitation-related diarrhoeal diseases. What’s the situation in India? “Four years since Swachh Bharat’s […]
Swachh Bharat, or Clean India, is typically seen as just an endeavour to place toilets in villages and encourage hand washing. While these things seem like simple measures to improve sanitation, the knock on effect of doing so could have far more wide ranging consequences. Three of seven most common causes of disease and death […]
Stunting during childhood reduces earnings later in life, in bad news for the millions of Indian children who suffer from the condition. Stunting refers to when a child is not tall enough for their age. The condition is generally caused by malnutrition or repeated infections. Prevalence of the condition in India is high, affecting 38.4 […]
“It is dirty everywhere”, this is how Amish Das describes his home: Boragaon, a landfill site which sprawls across 94 acres of wetland in Guwahati City in northeastern Assam. Amish, whose story was recounted in a feature for The Independent last year, has lived in Boragaon his entire life. His living is made through scavenging, […]
Dalsukh, a sanitation worker, went down a manhole on June 12. He did not come back up again. Descending into the manhole to clean it was Dalsukh’s job. A sanitation worker in the Ahmedabad district of Gujarat, he was cleaning drains near the Riyaz Hotel in Jamalpur. According to DNA India, CCTV footage showed Dalsukh […]
Diarrhoeal disease is commonplace and often lethal in the developing world low and middle countries (LMICs). Diarrhoea is identified as the second most common cause of death in children under five by the World Health Organization, with 1.7 billion cases and 520,000 deaths every year. In India, acute diarrhoeal disease (ADD) is the most […]
The Centre has issued another ambitious elimination deadline, this time targeting malaria. Marking World Malaria Day on April 25, the government has announced its intentions to eliminate the disease from the country by 2030. Statistics indicate around one million people suffer from malaria annually in India. World Health Organization (WHO) data suggests 400,000 deaths occur […]
Hyderabad has been declared open defecation free (ODF) by the Indian government. A Quality Council of India (QCI) inspectorate visited the city to check its sanitation facilities. This followed a series of efforts by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) to boost access to sanitation in the Telangana state capital. The measures included the […]
WaterAid claims 732 million Indians lack access to toilets. The government, however, dismisses the findings as ‘factually incorrect.’ Is basic sanitation lacking in India? The State of the World’s Toilets Report, 2017 says India has the most people in the world without access to ‘at least basic sanitation.’ The reports claims that 40 percent of […]
![By Muzi at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/www.healthissuesindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Hyderabad_Town_Hall.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1 "Hyderabad free of open defecation, says Centre")