Today’s Solutions: August 23, 2026

India has a major urban sanitation problem. More than 41 million people in urban India practice open defecation and 71.5 percent of the rural population does not have adequate access to sanitation facilities. On top of that, there are also people who resist using toilets because some see it as the status quo. To encourage more people to use latrines, two villages in the Barmer district have built an array of new lavatories and rewarding families who use them regularly with $37 each month. The idea is that by providing a monetary reward, the villages can deter people from open defecation, which poses many health and safety threats.

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