Once every few years, Microsoft founder Bill Gates makes us all feel small. Here is one of the world?s richest men, a technology champion and a master entrepreneur who comes down to India and talks about stuff that we Indians do not like to deliberate much about.
Probably the topics he deals with are not as cool as FDI in retail, proliferation of luxury brands, building airports and bailing out airlines. Gates talks about sanitation, healthy drinking water, and eradication of polio and malaria.
It is really funny that it takes a Gates to make us think about something as grave but mundane as sanitation. Sitting in his comfortable mansion in the United States he worries about India?s toilets, whereas most of our corporate chieftains have traditionally looked the other way when confronted with societal causes.
As per a 2011 census, half the country?s population do not have toilets at home, but have access to mobile phones. The data showed that 49.8% of the Indian households defecate in the open. Only 46.9% of India?s 24.66 crore households have toilet facilities while 3.2% use public toilets. No wonder Gates is worried, but the bigger worry is that we Indians are not too fussed about it. When he shakes hands with India?s rich and mighty, one wonders what he actually thinks of them.
Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh feels sanitation needs an ambassador and chooses Vidya Balan for the role. Someone who has a ?Dirty picture? to her credit now has to clean up her act, the minister seems to think. It is not quite clear how Vidya?s presence can offer any relief to anyone searching for an open space.
The truth is that the government has not thrown enough funds behind the project. The parliamentary standing committee on rural development has said that the crucial sector of rural drinking water supply and sanitation has not received adequate allocations as demanded by the ministry during the 11th Plan period (2007-12). While the ministry demanded R58,000 crore, the Planning Commission allotted R46,690 crore. ?Considering the fact that the expenditure to fight common diseases borne out of contaminated water and open defecation account for 6% of the GDP, the allocation of R14,000 crore for the sector for year 2012-13, is hardly adequate,? the committee noted.
So when Gates walks in, every now and then with great purpose, with solutions to tackle some of India?s biggest problems everyone sits up and takes notice. Gates, arguably still the biggest name alive in the technology world, is keen to achieve his ?dream? of inventing low cost toilets. He is attempting to design, with the help of other scientists and engineers, cheap and dry toilets. ?It should be possible to have a toilet that does not require running water, whose cost is very low and whose smell characteristics are as good or better than a flush toilet. But, it doesn?t exist yet,? he said.
These dry toilets, when created, can help improve the public health situation in third world countries, where lack of hygiene drives diseases. Gates? solution of cheap toilets that don?t need running water but can still deal with the issue of stench will be a great blessing in a country like India, where nearly 5 lakh children die due to diarrhoea annually. In India, Jharkhand tops the poor sanitation list with 77% of households having no toilet facilities, followed by 76.6% in Odisha and 75.8% in Bihar. But cheap toilet technology is not the only thing that Gates is doing in sanitation. ?We are doing things like trucks that clean up latrines more efficiently,? he said.
Somewhere along the line one?s thoughts went back to the days when Gates had thousands of detractors around the world, who questioned the way in which Microsoft ran its business. His name stood for ?ruthlessness?. It?s amazing just to think that the same man is now one of the world?s biggest givers. He is today the co-chair of the $37 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest philanthropic organisation in the world. And the tap just doesn?t seem to close.