You might not expect to find that you spend about three years of your life in the toilet, which is why it’s called “the big little thing”. Toilet use is not only about individuals, but also about millions of families.
Media reported that an elderly mother in her seventies in northeast China, before 2020, her daughter never stayed at home after she got married, and her son-in-law and granddaughter also left in a hurry when they came.
Why do daughters and sons-in-law dislike it? Old mother admitted, the reason is the toilet: “Smelly in summer, flies, maggots and mosquitos are many. In winter, seven holes and eight eyes, air leakage, a while on the frozen. They are used to urban toilets and are not used to such toilets.”
The “toilet revolution” changed that, however, as billions of dollars were poured into subsidizing toilet improvements that enabled millions of Chinese farmers to use hygienic toilets.
China arranges funds in the way of awards and compensation to guide and promote. The capital is put in, drive idea innovation, and the effect is obvious.
According to media reports, from 2004 to 2013, China invested 8.27 billion yuan to renovate toilets in rural areas, and solved the problem of toilet hygiene for 21.03 million households.
In 2019, 7 billion yuan will be allocated, and another 7.4 billion yuan will be allocated in 2020. In other words, 14.4 billion yuan will be allocated in two years. As a result, more than 35 million rural households have been renovated in China since 2018.
Toilets have been improved, toilets have been cleaned and people’s health has been maintained to a certain extent.
In rural areas, 80 percent of infectious diseases are caused by contaminated toilet faeces and unhygienic drinking water. In regions where the “toilet revolution” has been carried out, diarrhea, typhoid fever and hepatitis A have dropped by 35.2 percent, 25.1 percent and 37.3 percent, respectively.
Today, more than 80 percent of rural residents in China have access to sanitary toilets. The “toilet revolution” ended in 2020, but the campaign to popularize sanitary toilets is still going on.
Globally, toilet hygiene is also a problem. Even Bill Gates is looking for the best solution to clean toilets.
Over seven years, the Gates Foundation has spent more than $200 million on toilet projects, according to the data. According to the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund, 4.2 billion people live without safe and managed sanitation facilities, and at least 2 billion people use drinking water contaminated with feces.
India poses the most serious problem.
As of 2014, more than 186,000 children under the age of five died each year in India from diarrhoea due to drinking dirty water or poor sanitation.
In particular, an estimated 732 million people in India do not have access to a toilet, according to WaterAid’s 2017 World Toilet Day report. As early as 2010, the World Bank reported that the lack of toilets and other sanitation facilities costs India as much as $54 billion a year.
India’s favorite place to go to the toilet is not the bathroom, but nature, and as men do so, so do women have to.
Shri Narayan Sin, the Indian director of Toilet Hero, said: “It’s fine for men, but it’s particularly a problem for women because they can only use the toilet after dark, before sunrise, and during the day they have to endure it. It’s not just inconvenient, it causes serious crime problems.”
In fact, 50% of sexual assaults in India take place when a woman uses a toilet in the open. According to 2012 data, 90% of Indian women are harassed while going to the toilet, and a third of women say they have been attacked because of it.
To address these issues, Modi took office in 2014 and soon announced the launch of a “Clean India” initiative, promising to “build toilets for all”. India has built 110 million new toilets in five years for more than 600 million people, according to official figures.
It’s easy to build toilets, it’s hard to get Indians to go to toilets.
Unlike the growing desire for cleanliness in rural China, Indians do not see toilet use in the open as a dirty thing. On the contrary, they are influenced by the belief that toilets are unclean places, that installing them in the home will bring bad luck, and that nature is holy and “has the function of purifying evil and filth”.
Deep-rooted ideas are hard to change for a while. For this reason, the Indian government will “promote the toilet” into the wedding custom, encouraging brides to “no toilet, no marriage”, shouting “no toilet, no wife” and other slogans, and even the government would also reward the bride and groom for taking pictures together in their own toilet.
However, most of these actions have had little effect and India has not “eradicated open defecation” as Modi envisioned.
It is obvious that the divergence of ideas is the key to the very different effects of the toilet revolution in China and India.
Source: Chinese Businessmen Strategy