More mobile phones than toilets?

It's been all over the news media - a UN body has determined that there're more mobile phones than toilets in India. While it's well known that rural India could do with more sanitation facilities, and urban India could do with better sanitation for the poor, this sounded - how shall we put it - just a little sensationalist. Fact check time.

Step 1: read the article a bit more carefully to find out exactly what they compared, and how they measured things. One statement stood out - apparently, the comparison is between people who have access to toilets (not toilets themselves!) and mobile phones.

India has some 545 million cell phones, enough to serve about 45 per cent of the population, but only about 366 million people or 31 per cent of the population had access to improved sanitation in 2008.

Hmm, 545 million cell phones? In 2008? Unlikely. TRAI data indicates there were 543 million phone connections in November 2009. That includes 506 million mobile and 37 million wired telephones. A quick check for the previous year yields a number of 348 million mobile connections for the previous year 2008. So, even going by face value, there were fewer mobile connections than the 366 million number above.

Error 1: temporal shifts in data presented for comparison - it's not quite right to compare 2009 data for mobile phones with 2008 data for toilets. But let's grant them that.

Error 2: mixing up categories - landlines aren't mobile phones. Even if we grant the temporal inconsistency, the number of mobile phone connections is only 506 million among the 543 million reported.

Ok, move on. What's the number that TRAI reports? The summation of number of connections each operator reports to TRAI. And this also includes multiple connections used by the same person. This number is widely considered to be grossly inflated, by upto 40%. All things considered, it's unlikely that more than 300 million people use mobile phones.

Now let's look at how the alleged number of toilets was computed. The report in question doesn't state clearly how this number was arrived at (or I missed it). Page 43 reports that 31% of India have access to "improved" toilet facilities (note, not number of toilets), and 9% have access to shared (but satisfactory) toilets. Hmm, why do we not count shared toilets? Does this mean I didn't count as having access to a toilet in my days in college, when I lived in a hostel like most others?

Bottom line: while it's important to improve sanitation in rural areas, sensationalizing the numbers incorrectly isn't called for. There are fewer mobile phone users in India than those who have access to proper sanitation.

However noble your cause may be, two and two don't add up to three.