From: IBNLive
Reforms are as much about toilets as they are about FDI
Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh's statement that a nation's salvation lies in more toilets than temples has incurred the wrath of the VHP and Bajrang Dal. But how many Hindutva activists have bothered to clean up the immense filth scattered around most temple precincts? And how many of us have pondered on the utter scandal that 626 million Indians (more than half of our population) still defecate in the open, making India the world's open defecation capital? Brahmanical notions of purity and pollution mean an acceptance of the horror of manual scavenging and a belief that Dalit castes are born to clean human excrement. The caste Hindu shuns everything that is expelled from the body, probably a reason why we have been in collective denial about the need for universal modern toilets.
FULL TEXT AT: http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/sagarikaghose/223/63973/nirvana-in-the-loo.html
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