UMERKOT, Nov 18: Around 88 per cent households and 90 per cent schools in Tharparkar don’t have toilets and more than 90 per cent of the district population needs access to safe water and sanitation facilities.

This emerged from a recent survey conducted by a local non-governmental organisation in collaboration with and international agency, WaterAid.

Siddiq Khan, the agency’s representative in Pakistan, highlighted the risks associated with unhealthy practices and the lack of toilets. “While men, women and children all are equally vulnerable to contracting diseases by not washing or properly cleaning their body parts after relieving themselves in the open, women are also exposed to sexual harassment as no privacy is available to them for the call of nature,” he said. “Taboo doest allow them to share their grievances with others but the world cannot continue to ignore their problems,” he added.

According to Mr Khan, one in every three women in the world — more than 1.25 billion — lacks access to safe sanitation.

Sindh Minister for Population Welfare Syed Ali Mardan Shah, discussing the issue, agreed that it was a fact that the government never considered setting up public toilets in rural areas. However, he promised to make efforts for the allocation of a special fund for the essential toilet and sanitation facilities in certain areas as this would help reduce the burden of health care.

A local activist of the field, Ali Akbar Rahimoon, quotes facts from another survey to say that 45 million women in Pakistan lacked access to adequate toilets which put them at the risk of contracting various diseases, besides being sexually harassed and facing a great deal of embarrassment.

The lack of adequate sanitation facilities also affected people’s productivity, he said. “More than 40,000 mothers in Pakistan lose a child every year to diarrhoeal diseases caused due to unavailability of clean drinking water,” he said.

A number of programmes have been organised around the world for Nov 19, when World Toilet Day will be observed.

The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and the World Toilet Organisation (WTO) have also been spearheading a campaign to break the taboos associated with toilets and hygiene. A social activist, Ms Koonjh Leghari, who lives in Thar, says that adequate sanitation, coupled with access to clean drinking water, transforms life, improves individual and public health and also helps ensure one’s normal productivity.

A medical practitioner from Umerkot, Dr Ambreen, says that although men also suffer due to poor sanitation, women are disproportionately affected. Absence of privacy and toilets compels women to relieve themselves in fields, bushes or ditches, deserted rail tracks etc. “They are made to live in this highly embarrassing and humiliating situation that even their culture and religion do not allow to accept,” said the doctor.

Dr Moiz Ali Shah, also from Umerkot, says that poor sanitation and unavailability of safe water increased the risk of diarrhoea and infections that also cause blindness. “Women are also more susceptible to urinary tract infections and dehydration because they don’t drink enough water,” he said.

The municipal administration officer of Umerkot taluka, Abdul Jalil Thebo, conceded that it was the responsibility of municipality and the public health engineering departments to ensure availability of water and public toilets but said it was a gigantic task considering the superfluous landscape and scattered population of the district. Regarding sanitation, he said a drainage system was not sustainable in rural areas because of water scarcity. “Since it is hard to maintain the drains and keep them clean, they end up spreading diseases,” he said.