According to a United Nations report, approximately six of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones, but only 4.5 billion have access to toilets.

Only about half of India’s 1.2 billion people have access to toilets, and most of the other half defecate in the open as a common practice.

The results are extremely unsanitary conditions, contaminated water supplies, and the rise of disease and death.

After his election in 2014, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi began the Swachh Bharat campaign to improve sanitation throughout the nation, with the goal of making toilets available to the entire population by 2019.

This is a formidable task, as 80% of those who suffer from poor sanitation reside in rural districts.

One example is Katuru, a small village of approximately 7000 located about 180 miles southeast of the modern tech center, Hyderabad, in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Second Chance Charity is focused on helping sanitation in India, beginning with Katuru.

Throughout rural India, millions of villagers are exposed to widespread sanitation and health problems. Part of the reason behind this is the fact that clean water is in scarce supply, due to the contamination that comes from human waste, pollution, and other factors.

To get drinking water, only the more wealthy residents can afford to buy pre-bottled water, and that is at an exceptionally high price. Most people use manual hand pumps with which they draw water from the wells, water that is often highly contaminated, and is not filtered or sanitized in any way.

As a result, the poor water degrades the villagers' immune systems, leading to the contraction of diseases like AIDS, HIV, and tuberculosis. There are reports of many children who, from drinking the water, died at a young age from diarrhea. Life expectancy of the population in general becomes lower.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that so many people have no access to any sanitation or toilet facilities. Typically, that portion of the population urinate and defecate in the open, in public. These waste materials seep into the water system, which is not filtered, treated, or decontaminated.

In Katuru, as with millions of rural villages across the entirety of India, hospitals to treat the sick are very far away. This is made worse by the fact that many towns do not have any kind of ambulance or emergency transportation to give people access to health care during times of crisis.