In "Sanitation Nightmare," Bloomberg News reporter Jason Gale reported on water-related peril that people don't often speak about amid India's economic boom: the nation's reliance on open defecation. His reporting presented a startling contrast to India's image as a rising world-class power.He reported that everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they're not already. Open defecators in the country outnumber members of the middle class by roughly two-to-one. Gale found that more than half of the nation's 1.2 billion people rely on open defecation and three-quarters of the country's surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent. The crisis has far-ranging health implications. Every day, 1,000 children younger than 5 years old die in India from diarrhea, hepatitis-causing pathogens and other sanitation-related diseases. India has the highest childhood malnutrition rates in the world: 44 percent of children younger than five are underweight. The substandard sanitary conditions also deprive people of their dignity, rob girls of their ability to finish school and put women and children at risk of violence and abuse.
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