Much has been made recently about the appalling rates of open defecation in India, a country that has on other development indicators shown stunning successes. Almost 600 million people in India defecate in fields, forests, bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than in closed latrines or toilets—that’s more than 10 times the number of any other single country, and 60% of the world’s total.
Why, in contrast, does neighboring Bangladesh—a country not only sharing a border but many religious, social, and cultural norms of South Asia—show such sanitation success?