Stockholm Water Prize

The SIWI headline is “Indian Sanitation Innovator and Social Reformer Awarded 2009 Stockholm Water Prize”. The laureate is Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in India − and the first ‘sanitation person’ to receive the award (all previous laureates have been water/wastewater people, with the exception of WaterAid which won the prize in 1995) − so, many congratulations to him (and also to SIWI for making the award for sanitation − why on earth didn’t they do so last year, the International Year of Sanitation? But better late than never). I personally prefer the SPARC approach to communal sanitation (see here), but there’s no doubt that Sulabh has done tremendously good work.