Rohini Nilekani Quotes

Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development - it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor - it's all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility.

Although we take it for granted, sanitation is a physical measure that has probably done more to increase human life span than any kind of drug or surgery.

People with water-borne diseases occupy more than 50% of hospital beds across the world. Does the answer lie in building more hospitals? Really, what is needed is to give them clean water.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

So many diseases and illnesses have fundamental roots in the lack of clean water. Resolving the clean water crisis would mitigate a lot of problems.

The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.

When I was growing up, hand washing was a ritual, but now it's a necessity. A child dies every 15 seconds from preventable causes, which has got to stop.

Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.

My secret is one the world needs to know - nearly a billion people a year die from unsafe drinking water.

Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had.

No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.

In 2009, I traveled to South Sudan with my organization PSI. While there, I visited a local school and met with a group of children who had formed a water club. The group learned about how to treat their drinking water and use proper hygiene practices, such as washing their hands before eating or after going to the bathroom.

Availability of water is critical for sanitation projects. Without water, toilets can't be kept clean. Places where there is no drinking water, water for toilets becomes complicated.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households.

The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.

Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

In 1820, the average lifespan was just 26 years. Twenty-six years!

Hand washing is the first basic step towards achieving any millennium goals for development. It saves lives.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

In large part, thanks to widespread immunization, the number of young children dying each year has declined significantly, from approximately 14 million in 1979 to slightly less than eight million in 2010.

I find the fact that more than 750,000 children still die every year around the world because of severe dehydration due to diarrhea unacceptable.

We have to do whatever we can to ensure that no child dies of diarrhea.

Let him not throw urine or feces into the water, nor saliva, nor clothes defiled by impure substances, nor any other impurity, nor blood, nor poisonous things.

People must have water, affordable, necessary water.