Water supply and sanitation in India

thumb| The fact that even smaller towns and villages had impressive drainage systems indicates that removing polluted water and sewage was an important part of the daily concerns of the Indus people. - JM Kenoyer Water supply and sanitation in India, in 2018, 98.7% of Indians had access to the basic water and sanitation facilities. India faces challenges ranging from sourcing water| for its megacities to its distribution network which is intermittent in rural areas with continuous distribution networks just beginning to emerge. Non-revenue water is a challenge. Quotes At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap. Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’. William Dalrymple - White Mughals "The fact that even smaller towns and villages had impressive drainage systems” remarks Kenoyer, “indicates that removing polluted water and sewage was an important part of the daily concerns of the Indus people.” JM Kenoyer quoted in Danino, M., & Nahar, S. (1996). The invasion that never was (1st ed). Mother’s Institute of Research & Mira Aditi, Mysore, India. A surprising spirit of cleanliness is to be observed among the Hindoos: the streets of their villages are commonly swept and watered, and sand is frequently strewed before the doors of the houses. William Hodges , quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was not, as Anatole France thought it, la seule morale, but it was made an essential part of piety. Manu laid down, many centuries ago, an exacting code of physical refinement. “Early in the morning,” one instruction reads, “let him” (the Brahman) “bathe, decorate his body, clean his teeth, apply collyrium to his eyes, and worship the gods.” The native schools made good manners and personal cleanliness the first courses in the curriculum. Every day the caste Hindu would bathe his body, and wash the simple robe he was to wear; it seemed to him abominable to use the same garment, unwashed, for more than a day. “The Hindus,” said Sir William Huber, “stand out as examples of bodily cleanliness among Asiatic races, and, we may add, among the races of the world. The ablutions of the Hindu have passed into a proverb.” Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (1935) The Brahman usually washed his hands, feet and teeth before and after each meal; he ate with his fingers from food on a leaf, and thought it unclean to use twice a plate, a knife or a fork; and when finished he rinsed his mouth seven times. The toothbrush was always new—a twig freshly plucked from a tree; to the Hindu it seemed disreputable to brush the teeth with the hair of an animal, or to use the same brush twice: so many are the ways in which men may scorn one another. Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (1935) You would, my Arabella, be enraptured at the extreme neatness of even the meanest attendant; but besides the beauty and the virtue of cleanliness, it is the only fence in the East against putrid diseases. That unerring guide, Nature, who teaches the people of the North to fortify themselves with furs against their inclement seasons, bids the inhabitants of Indostan be correctly delicate in their persons, and personal attire: to which the circumstance of all the servants being Gentoos not a little contributes; for diurnal immersion in the river Ganges is one of the strict articles of their religion, at the same time that it is a general benefit to the Europeans. Hartly House, Calcutta - Phebe Gibbes Purity means cleanliness of mind and body; the latter is effected by the use of water etc. No nation in the world is as cleanly in the body as the Hindu, who uses water very freely. Vivekananda For their part, Indians and Asians considered Westerners puzzlingly dirty. To some extent, it was a matter of merocrine sweat glands, which Caucasians have in profusion while Asians have few or none. (Because of this, they can still find even clean Westerners very smelly.) Partly it was that Christianity’s emphasis on the spirit encouraged a certain neglect and disparagement of the physical side of life, and Christian teachings, unlike those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, ignored hygiene. And partly the difference between West and East was that much of Europe took a long hiatus when it came to regular washing, roughly from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and non Westerners who encountered Europeans in those centuries were often stunned by their abysmal hygiene. Ashenburg, Katherine, Clean : an unsanitised history of washing by Ashenburg, Katherine External links Category:India