Singapore can offer lessons in sanitation: Study

KOCHI: As India embarks on Swachh Bharat mission with the goal of eradicating open defecation by 2019, a study has suggested developing world cities can learn lessons from East Asian countries like Singapore when it comes to modernising slums with safe water and proper sanitation.

"In Singapore, the widespread extension of access to household sanitation happened through a large government-subsidised low-income housing programme.

"The rapid and widespread availability of affordable public housing saw a huge number of people move from informal Kampong, or unfit slum housing, where open defecation was common, to flats with access to private safe sanitation," says the research paper titled 'Achieving Total Sanitation and Hygiene Coverage Within A Generation - Lessons from East Asia'.

The study was conducted by WaterAid - an international non-profit organisation that was set up in 1981 as a response to the UN International Drinking Water and Sanitation decade (1981-1990).

Writing a foreword note to the research, Chairman India and Director HSBC Asia Pacific, Naina Lal Kidwai, said "Both the need for sanitation and diverse challenges in delivering, as well as sustaining, sanitary services are immense and apparent in my home country of India."

According to estimates, India accounts for almost 60 per cent of open defecations in the world, which has been described as "shameful" by many top government functionaries and civil society activists.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched an ambitious Clean India campaign last year to achieve total sanitation by 2019.