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United Nations, Nov 14 (ANI): Pakistan spends 47 times more money on military than its annual budget allocated for arranging water and sanitation facilities, a United Nations report has said.
The annual report of UN Development Programme noted that Pakistan's military budget should be cut to help reduce childhood deaths and boost overall development.
Titled "Beyond scarcity: Power, politics and the global water crisis", the report painted a grim picture of global imbalances and the low political priority accorded to safe drinking water and sanitation.
It observed that the lack of access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation killed nearly two million children across the world each year. This amounted to nearly 5000 deaths per day, most of them preventable, and made diarrhoea the second biggest childhood killer, the Dawn quoted the report as saying.
It said that flush toilets could be a cheap but powerful tool to protect children's lives. It added that two out of three people in South Asia lack basic sanitation, numbers that put the region on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.
"No access to sanitation is a polite way of saying that people draw water for drinking, cooking and washing from rivers, lakes, ditches and drains fouled with human and animal excrement," said report’s author Kevin Watkins.
He added: "The toilet may seem an unlikely catalyst for human development, but the report provides abundant and powerful evidence to show how it benefits people's wellbeing. Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people." (ANI)
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