Craters on the moon’s surface as seen by Chandrayaan-1

New Delhi, Nov. 17: Having sent a rocket to the moon, India is now ready to show it hasn’t given up on earthly surroundings yet.

From tomorrow, Delhi hosts the three-day South Asian Conference on Sanitation (Sacosan), where governments, activists and UN officials from across the planet will ponder the problem of 60 lakh Indians having to defecate in the open.

But perhaps to dispel the whiff of third-worldness any such discussion is bound to generate, the government will be tagging it with a subject more in keeping with its new space-age status.

This relates to sanitation and waste management during India’s proposed manned mission to the moon. In other words, how do you tackle the delicate challenge of relieving yourself in space where there is no gravity to pull the waste down once released?

“Sanitation is an issue everywhere and will obviously be an issue for the moon mission too. Our attempt is to sort it out along with other problems,” drinking water and sanitation secretary Santha Sheela Nair said.

She said senior scientist Siva Thanu Pillai was expected to address the session on moon mission sanitation.

The priorities, however, are clear: the space theme has been included only to make the point that sanitation is an issue even on moon missions, Nair said. “With this rather strange theme, we intend to draw attention to the real issue, that is, total sanitation for all.”

If India has to achieve total sanitation under the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2012, it must build 400,000 household toilets every day, at 278 a minute.

“It’s an uphill task, but not unattainable. We are trying our best to eradicate open defecation by 2010,” Nair said.

A UN study says over half the 1.2 billion people who defecate in the open worldwide are Indian. This comes to more than half of all Indians. Diseases caused by the practice cost the country an estimated Rs 1,200 crore, and 20 crore man-days, a year.

Nair’s “strange theme”, however, isn’t much easier to solve.

The earliest space toilet was a large plastic bag with sticky tapes for the buttocks. The astronaut placed his fingers on indentations on the bag’s sides, grabbed the faeces at the moment of release and flung them to the bag’s far end, then rolled the bag up.

Nasa’s $23.4-million toilet for the Space Shuttle uses a continuous flow of cabin air to push the faeces toward the toilet’s bottom. Rotating fans distribute the solid waste for storage. It is then vacuum-dried while liquid waste is vented in space.

Sacosan will also discuss waste management for troops in Siachen, women’s sanitation issues, financing sanitation through bank credit, e-waste management, new technologies and public-private partnerships. The meeting, the first in India, will end with a “Delhi Declaration”.