Talking toilets: Bill Gates uses 360 video to show how India is winning in its clean sanitation battle.
In India, a huge chunk of the population doesn’t have access to such clean toilets, instead using unsanitary ones or just doing their business out in the open.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is aiming to change that with the Clean India campaign, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Bill Gates highlighted the program in his most recent Gates Notes blog post, complete with 360-degree video.
“What I love most about Clean India is that it identified a big problem, got everyone working on it, and is using measurement to show where things need to be done differently,” Gates wrote in the post.
“As the old saying goes, ‘What gets measured gets done.’ If you don’t set ambitious targets and chart your progress, you end up settling for business as usual — and in this case, business as usual would mean poor sanitation keeps killing more than half a million Indians every year.” The Clean India project is a good example of how massive public health initiatives can succeed.
Gates also writes that the project has a detailed plan to get that number to 100 percent by 2019, which would drastically improve public health across the country and perhaps even turn those unsafe toilets into places to make clean fertilizer.
Gates writes that making sanitary toilets widely available would drastically improve public health, make access to education easier for young girls and could even save the country almost $106 billion a year.
Now that’s a bold goal.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder is no stranger to tackling the taboo subject of sanitation.
And in 2015, he sipped on a glass of drinking water made from human waste to prove a point about finding solutions.