World Toilet Day 2022: History, Significance, This Year’s Theme And More…

This day holds a huge significance as it underlines the need for cleanliness and proper hygiene to keep our surroundings clean.

World Toilet Day 2022: World Toilet Day is celebrated across the globe every year to create awareness about sanitation and hygiene. The UN General Assembly declared World Toilet Day an official UN day in 2013 after Singapore had tabled the resolution. It is the same day the World Toilet Organization came into existence in 2001.

This day holds a huge significance as it underlines the need for cleanliness and proper hygiene to keep our surroundings clean. The United Nations aims to explore how poor sanitation systems spread human waste into rivers, lakes and soil, polluting underground water resources.

World Toilet Day 2022: Significance

• Today, 3.6 billion people are still living with poor-quality toilets that ruin their health and pollute their environment.
• Over 800 children under age five die from diarrhoea linked to unsafe water, sanitation and poor hygiene.
• The sanitation infrastructure in India is still not up to the mark, thereby causing the wastes to flow into the water bodies which pollutes the water and is a big cause of several diseases.
• The day aims to create action and awareness so that everybody has access to toilets.
• The UN website states, “Sanitation action is urgent. We are seriously off track to ensure safe toilets for all by 2030. With only eight years left, the world needs to work four times faster to meet our promise.”

This Year’s Theme

The theme of World Toilet Day 2022 is “Let’s make the invisible visible.”

Where Does India Stand When It Comes To Sanitation

Under PM Modi’s flagship program “Swachh Bharat Mission” the nation saw an acceleration in the efforts to achieve universal sanitation coverage and to put the focus on sanitation. Under the mission, by 2 October 2019, all villages, gram panchayats, districts, states, and union territories in India declared themselves “open-defecation free” (ODF). It coincided with the 150th birth anniversary of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi.