While the UN agencies announce global programmes like “Health for All”, “Water and Sanitation for All”, “Education for All” to meet the challenges of development worldwide they are unable to manage these global human development challenges.

Now their latest slogan is millennium development goals (MDGs) to be met by 2015, which comprises of eight goals that appear very simplistic on the face but are complex to achieve on the ground, given the multiple geographical, political and social conditions in different countries.

For instance, goal number seven states “Halve the number of people without access to safe water and sanitation”. One of the flagship UN agencies, the UNICEF, has been in the business of providing water and sanitation services (WSS) for decades.

And also the World Bank and UNDP. But countries like India and Bangladesh have huge problems not just in creating access to protected WSS but in tackling the issues of water quality and contamination. The UNICEF, over the decades, has installed millions of hand pumps, namely the “India Mark I” and shallow well hand pumps.

However, with the shrinking underground water levels these pumps have remained defunct in many villages. In fact UNICEF was threatened with a lawsuit in Bangladesh because arsenic was found in the water, owing to declining water levels.

Also certain states in India like West Bengal have had detection of arsenic though not in the same level as in Bangladesh. In Karnataka too there are traces of iron and fluoride content in water especially in Bellary and mineral rich areas of Sandur.

Arsenic has contaminated over 90 per cent of the shallow tube wells in Muradnagar sub district just three hours away from Dhaka. The UNICEF, which felt guilty for drilling millions of shallow tube wells, has now gifted the sub district a $ 4,000 filtration plant, which can strip arsenic and iron up to 2,000 litres of water.

The “arsentaor” devised by UNICEF engineers can detect whether the village groundwater is laced with an arsenic concentration or not. Water with arsenic if consumed would affect human organs causing black lesions and terminal cancer. In 1980 the UN proclaimed its “sanitation decade” and India was a signatory to the UN Declaration.

According to the Ministry of Water Resources even in 2004 many states had as many as 80 per cent of the households without protected WSS. Kerala is the only state with the highest coverage and it has just 18 per cent of the households without WSS.

Open defecation is still rampant in many states, as we talk of economic reforms with a human face. Without a doubt, there are also many success stories in WSS like the Ramakrishna Mission doing exemplary work in Midnapore district of West Bengal covering nearly 100 per cent households with WSS. But such efforts unfortunately are not scaled up all over the country.

Toilet technology like the two pit leach toilets are easy to maintain and do not need gurgling water flush. Kerala has shown the way to build such toilets but many states are still not interested in “Sanitation for All”.

Women and children are the worst sufferers of open defecation practices. Even our school sanitation programmes are not a great success. In Karnataka computers are more of an attraction to teachers than toilets! There are many primary school teachers who prefer to lock the toilets than teach the kids to use them properly.

In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar many parents prefer not to send their daughters to high schools if they are not provided with school toilets.

There are many programmes like “Mahila Samakhya” focussed on women and SHGs. Karnataka has in place the Suvarna Gram Yojana. However, grams will never attain Suvarna status unless they have protected WSS facility.

Instead of hiring social contractors like NGOs to make blueprints for the Karnataka Suvarna Gram Yojanas the Gram Panchayats should be made to achieve 100 per cent access of the households to protected WSS. That would be the biggest tribute to our fellow citizens of Suvarna Karnataka.