Around 630 million people in the South East Asian countries, including India, use a faeces-contaminated drinking water source, the WHO said on Friday.
Worldwide, the global health body said, almost two billion people use a source of drinking water contaminated with faeces, putting them at the risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio.
In a new WHO report, published on behalf of UN-Water, the United Nations inter-agency coordination mechanism for all freshwater-related issues including sanitation, it was asserted that the nations worldwide were not increasing their spending fast enough to ensure water and sanitation targets, under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for 2030.
According to the UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) 2017 report, the countries have increased their budgets for water, sanitation and hygiene at an annual average rate of 4.9 percent over the last three years.
"The percentage for South East Asia is 35 percent of people use a source of drinking water contaminated with faeces (that is around 630 million people)," WHO said to an email query on how much of the 2 billion people are in South Asian region.
"The countries are not increasing spending fast enough to meet the water and sanitation targets under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Radical increase in water and sanitation investment required to meet development targets," the WHO report said.
"However, aid commitments to these three regions were only 48 percent of global Official development assistance (ODA) for water and sanitation in 2015.
These regions contain China and India, both middle income countries, which collectively house a high proportion of the unserved for sanitation, but received just over 3 percent of water and sanitation aid commitments in 2015, the GLAAS 2017 report said.
In the GLAAS country survey, a total of 57 countries provided an aggregated national budget for WASH services while nearly one half of these countries also presented these budgets disaggregated for water and sanitation.
The 57 countries represent 4.4 billion people and report USD 85 billion in annual budgets for WASH (for the most recent budget year).
A range of fiscal budget years was reported from 2014 to 2017 and "three countries, China, Brazil, and India representing 2.9 billion people, report USD 67 billion in annual budgets for WASH," the GLAAS report said.
According to the report, a total of 87,125 diarrhoea deaths due to inadequate WASH in children under 5 years in 2012 were reported in India. It also said at the national level, 40 percent used improved sanitation facilities in 2015.
WHO said that in many developing countries, current national coverage targets are based on achieving access to basic infrastructure, which "may not" always provide continuously safe and reliable services.
It said that over 70 percent of countries report having specific measures to reach poor populations in their WASH policies and plans.
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