India’s sanitation crisis

Far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet, according to a United Nations study on how to improve sanitation levels globally.

India’s mobile subscribers totalled 563.73 million at the last count, enough to serve nearly half of the country’s 1.2 billion population.

But just 366 million people – around one-third of the population – had access to proper sanitation in 2008.

Poor sanitation is a major contributor to water-borne diseases, which in the past three years alone killed an estimated 4.5 million children under the age of five worldwide, according to the study.

Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri reports from New Delhi.