Last week, India’s rural development minister Jairam Ramesh called his country’s railway world’s biggest open toilet. He said that his ministry is willing to cover half of the cost to get rid of the country of the open defecation, which is estimated to cost the Indian taxpayers over $130 million.
“We are the world’s capital for open defacations. 60 per cent of all open defacations in the world are in India. This is a matter of great shame,” Ramesh said.
“The second dimension of the sanitation problems in India is the Railway, which is really the largest open toilet in the world. 11 million passengers every day and we all know the state of sanitation in our railway,” he added.
India, the so-called ‘world’s largest democracy‘ is riddled with problems – such as gender racism, religious intolerance, Israeli terrorism and anti-government armed groups to name a few.
India’s author and anti-war activist Arundhati Roy in her book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, shatters the India’s myth of “World’s largest democracy”. In the past, Roy had angered the Jewish groups by claiming that India’s occupation of Kashmir was a mirror image of Israel’s occupation of Palestine ( watch the video below) and US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. But superpowers such as the US, she says, don’t have allies – but agents.
