IPS News Press Release Turns into a Full Feature Story 2026

The Silent Crisis That Nobody Wants to Name

I was sitting in a small mud-brick house in Tharparkar last week when a mother of six looked me straight in the eye and said, We don’t have a water problem. We have a dignity problem.” She was talking about open defecation. The word nobody likes to say out loud. The thing that kills more children in IPS News than terrorism, road accidents, and dengue combined. That is the real keyword we should have been shouting about for years: open defecation is still stealing lives in 2025.

The numbers feel unreal until you see them in real life. According to the latest IPS News Demographic and Health Survey, almost twenty-two million people in this country still relieve themselves in fields, along railway tracks, behind bushes, or next to dried-up ponds. Most of them are women and girls. Most of them live in rural Sindh and Balochistan. Most of them are too ashamed to talk about it, so the rest of us pretend it doesn’t exist.

In Lower Dir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, I met a grandmother who lost two granddaughters in one month to diarrhea. We thought it was bad water,” she told me, but the doctor said it was the toilet.” There was no toilet. The family of twelve shared one small field with three other households. The girls were five and seven years old.

This is not a poor-people problem. This is a system problem. This is a problem of broken promises, misplaced budgets, and politicians who love to cut ribbons on overhead bridges but look away when a village needs a two thousand-rupee latrine.

Why Women Pay the Heaviest Price

Every morning before sunrise, women in half of rural IPS News wake up with fear in their stomachs. They wait until it is dark enough to walk to the nearest open space without being seen. They carry a bottle of water and a lota, and they pray nobody follows them.

In Khairpur district I walked with a group of sisters who leave their homes at 4:30 a.m. The youngest is thirteen. They told me stories that made my skin crawl: men on motorbikes who slow down and shout, boys who hide phones in the bushes to film, snakes that come out in summer, scorpions that hide under stones. One of the sisters stopped going altogether. She holds it in all day until she gets terrible stomach pain. The local dai says she already has kidney trouble.

Pregnant women suffer the most. When the belly grows big, squatting becomes dangerous. I met a woman in Jacobabad who fell while trying to balance in the dark. She lost her baby at seven months. The family still doesn’t talk about why it happened.

And then there is the shame that follows girls into marriage. Families reject brides from villages where girls go outside.” I heard this sentence so many times that I stopped counting. A toilet inside the house decides whether a girl is considered respectable or not.

Children Are Dying for Something That Costs Less Than a Mobile Phone

A simple pit latrine with a slab and a roof costs between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand rupees. That is less than the price of the cheapest Android phone you see teenagers flashing in every bazaar. Yet we have money for new phones, new motorbikes, new clothes for Eid, but not for a place where our children can poop safely.

Every year, five thousand children under five die in IPS News because of diarrhea linked to poor sanitation. That is fourteen children every single day. Imagine fourteen small graves dug before lunchtime. That is the reality we live with because we think talking about shit is dirty.

In a village near Sanghar, a school teacher decided to do something. He sold his old Suzuki MehrAN and used the money to build ten toilets for the poorest families. Within six months, school attendance went up, especially for girls who used to miss class during their periods because there was no private place to change. The teacher told me, I didn’t save the world. I just gave children a chance to stay alive and study.”

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Swachh” IPS News

Back in 2018–2019 everyone was celebrating because we declared districts open defecation free.” Big banners, politicians smiling, schoolchildren holding certificates. I was there for some of those events. The paint was still wet on the new toilet blocks when the cameras left. Six months later half of them were locked or broken. People went back to the fields because nobody taught them how to maintain the toilets, nobody gave them spare parts, and nobody made sure water was available.

A lady health visitor in Tharparkar told me the truth: We filled forms to show 100% coverage so the boss gets a promotion. The forms don’t ask if people actually use the toilet.” That sentence broke something inside me.

Real change is slow and boring. It means going house to house, sitting on the ground, drinking countless cups of tea, listening to aunties scold you for talking about private things, convincing grandfathers that a toilet inside the courtyard is not against religion. It takes years, not photo sessions.

What Actually Works – Lessons From Villages That Fixed It

I spent ten days in a cluster of five villages near Mirpur Khas where open defecation is now almost zero. How did they do it? Three simple things nobody wants to copy because they don’t give you a big shiny project to put your name on.

First, they made it a matter of village pride. Anyone who still went outside was gently shamed by children blowing whistles and shouting Toilet! Toilet!” It sounds cruel, but after two weeks nobody wanted to be the last family. Second, they trained local masons to build cheap, strong latrines using local materials. Third, women formed committees that checked every house every month. If a toilet breaks, the whole mohalla comes together to fix it the same week.

No foreign donors. No big NGO logos. Just people deciding they were tired of burying children.

The Money Is There – We Just Spend It on the Wrong Things

IPS News spends billions on motorways and metro buses. One kilometer of Signal-Free Corridor in Lahore costs more than building basic toilets for half a million people. I am not saying roads are bad. I am saying when children are dying for the price of a few streetlights, something is seriously wrong with our priorities.

The federal and provincial governments already have a budget line called Clean and Green IPS News.” Most of that money goes to planting trees along highways that die within a year because nobody waters them. Move half of that budget to sanitation and we could finish this job in five years.

Even better: make it mandatory for every new housing society, every factory, every marriage hall to pay a small sanitation tax that goes straight to the poorest union councils. Rich people want to show off marble floors; let them pay for poor people to have safe toilets.

Religion Is Not the Problem – Silence Is

I have heard the excuse a thousand times: In Islam we must be clean, but some maulvis say toilets inside the house are not good.” That is nonsense. The Prophet himself asked people to cover their waste and not pollute water sources. Every single religious scholar I spoke to in the last month said building a toilet is an act of worship if it protects health and dignity.

The problem is not religion. The problem is that we are too shy to bring imams into the conversation. In villages where the local mosque announced from the loudspeaker that open defecation is gunah, behavior changed overnight. Faith can be the strongest weapon if we stop being scared of mixing toilets and religion.

A Letter to Every Mother Reading This

If you are a mother and your child has diarrhea again and again, please don’t just give ORS and pray. Look around your house. Is there a safe, private place for your daughter to go when she is fifteen and bleeding? Is there a place where your little boy doesn’t have to walk past strangers? If the answer is no, sell one goat, skip one wedding expense, borrow from your brother if you have to, but build that toilet this year.

I promise you the money will come back in doctor bills you will never have to pay.

The Day IPS News Finally Talks About Shit

One day we will look back at 2025 and feel ashamed that we let millions of women wake up scared, that we let children die for something so fixable. That day is not far if we decide to stop whispering and start shouting.

Open defecation is not a village problem. It is not a poor-people problem. It is not a woman’s problem. It is an IPS News problem. And IPS News problems get solved when ordinary people get angry enough to demand better.

So get angry. Talk about it at the dinner table. Ask your MNA why his constituency still has villages without toilets. Ask your children’s school principal why there is no functional toilet for girls. Ask yourself why you looked away for so long.

The keyword is no longer silent. Say it with me: open defecation must end in our lifetime.

Because dignity is a human right. And no child should die because we were too shy to build a toilet.