Basic Needs for Human Existence

Dr. Tapati Baruah Kashyap

There are certain basic needs that cannot be avoided at any cost, especially when it concerns survival of human beings. Safe drinking water and sanitation are two such basic needs that mankind has identified over the past few decades. While there is no denying the fact that water is indispensable for human existence and is considered as the elixir of life, safe drinking water and sanitation have also emerged as two basic requirements for ensuring human development.

Though more than two-thirds of the globe is covered by water, yet getting safe drinking water has been a huge worldwide problem. The situation in Assam is no different. The mighty Brahmaputra and numerous tributaries flow through Assam. But, even then, water is so scarce that it sometimes looks like as acute in some states of the country that lie in the dry desert regions. Going by the findings of the Census of 2001, access to safe drinking water in Assam is nothing but far from satisfactory. When discussing drinking water, it is not just the quantity or availability of water that has to be taken into consideration. In fact, what is of vital importance is the quality of water that the people are actually getting.

It may sound strange, but it is a fact that access to safe drinking water in Assam is substantially less than the national average. The population in Assam with access to safe drinking water is only 77.55 per cent compared to the all-India figure of 88 per cent. As per Census of India, if a household has access to drinking water supplied from tap or a hand pump or tube well situated within or outside the premises, it is considered as having access to safe drinking water. Out of 49, 35, 358 households that were recorded in the Census of 2001 in Assam, only 37.88 percent (18,69,870 households) had drinking water sources available within the premises. This means that the rest of the households in Assam draw their drinking water from unsafe open sources. Of these remaining households that do not have safe drinking water source within their premises in Assam, as many as 3,44,992 households draw water from tanks, ponds and lakes; 2,56,813 households from rivers and streams; 67,154 from springs and 49,631 households from ‘any other’ sources.

Millions of people in the country suffer from water-borne diseases on account of lack of access to safe drinking water. It is the poor who suffer most because in most cases, water-borne diseases originate in and enter the human body through unsafe water. With a huge population still having no access to safe drinking water facility in the country, at least about 1.5 million children below the age of five years die every year due to various water borne diseases. Moreover, the infant mortality rate (IMR) of India at 69.5 per 1,000 live births remains very high.

The concept of sanitation was earlier limited to disposal of human excreta by cesspools, open ditches, pit latrines, bucket system etc. Today it connotes a comprehensive concept, which includes liquid and solid waste disposal, food hygiene, personal, domestic as well as environmental hygiene. Sanitation so is one of the basic determinants of quality life and human development index.

Sanitation and water supply are two important components of well being and good health. India’s sanitation record is extremely poor. According to the United Nations Human Development Report, 2006, a mere 33 per cent of India’s population has access to improved sanitation facilities. And that is the cause of high rate of infant mortality rate. In case of Assam, we still see poor sanitation. According to 2001 Census report, while only about 64.65 percent population of Assam have access to toilet facilities, which means the remaining 35.35 per cent (nearly 93 lakh people) defecate in the open or in the unsafe and most dangerous way. Moreover, while 64.65 per cent of people of Assam technically have access to toilet facilities, only about 15.89 per cent actually have scientific and safe toilets that are fitted with water flush. In the rural areas of Assam on the other hand the situation is so pathetic that only about 8.61 per cent people have safe, scientific toilets having water flush facilities. Even dangerous is the fact that while over 47 per cent of rural people in Assam use pit latrines, then the number of such people using pit latrines in urban areas is also not very low; the Census report puts it at an alarming 26.38 per cent!

Moreover, another root cause of poor sanitation is that sanitation has always been given low priority by the government. The government did launch the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) in 1986. Subsequently however, it has been revised and rechristened as Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) with increased emphasis on information, education and communication (IEC), human resource development, capacity development activities to increase awareness among the rural people and generation of demand for sanitary facilities.

Way back in 1925 Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “The cause of many of our diseases is the condition of our lavatories and our bad habit of disposing of excreta anywhere and everywhere.” A little less than a century later, the situation in India is not that better. It was in the heart of Guwahati that an outbreak of cholera and other water-borne diseases occurred last year. Over 200 persons on the other hand died in the state’s tea plantations due to water-borne diseases during 2007.

That the situation in Assam needs to undergo drastic change in the most urgent manner can be gauged from the fact that only two panchayats of the state could make it to the list of village panchayats selected for the Nirmal Gram Puraskar during 2006-07 by the government of India for having ensured sanitary toilet facilities in every premise within its jurisdiction. The number of such panchayats that received the same award from Maharashtra was about 600. Even Bihar, which, in the public mindset is often considered to be a state low in the human development list, had more villages than Assam in the Nirmal Gram Puraskar award list.