Yes, they can.
But they can also choose to do some things before they do other things.
The USA went thru a similar issue in the early 20th century to encourage people to build proper outhouses that dont pollute drinking water supplies or lead to the spread of disease.
From the site:
“While the Work Projects Administration is known for a wide variety of public architecture, one of their more prolific programs was a health-related campaign to provide sanitary privies, particularly in rural areas. This program ultimately resulted in 2.3 million WPA-built privies in the nation; nearly 32,000 of those were in Colorado. While other New Deal programs supplied some 600,000 sanitary privies across the nation, the WPA concrete vault sanitary privies provided a substantial change in sanitation infrastructure for rural American communities, creating a significant increase in the quality of public health. These simple buildings are readily recognizable due to their standardized plans.”
So really if the US government could build 2.3 million privies in the 1930’s, why cant the Indian government do it today?
Reminds me of myself about ten years ago walking out of a bar after 2 a.m. closing with a drink in my hand and not a fear in the world. I had a taxi on the way. Fargo north dakota. I went out back and got behind a dumpster to take a piss knowing my taxi would be showing up soon. Sure enough some dork cop on a bicycle is making his rounds and sees me pissing. I took off like Carl Lewis with the dork cop in hot pursuit. I am still amazed at how fast I could run back then after 20 or so captain cokes. Needless to say, I never saw that cop or my taxi every again. It took me over two hours to get back to my hotel.
You can build the toilets, but are they going to use them? According to at least one report, many in India prefer open defecation.
The US just spent a trillion dollars on a fancy new aeroplane while there still remains deep poverty in rural Appalachia that would astound the average American. That’s enough to send 12,000 Indian probes to Mars so, by your logic, we should be fixing problems 12,000 times as serious as open defecation with that money.
While there’s not open defecation, there’s still the widespread lack of sex education or abstinence only education in schools which is equally a deep social problem with no easy solutions.
Pointing out that Govt could better prioritize it’s money is a pointless task because Govt can always better prioritize it’s money. The problem is that there’s no mechanism to transfer the funds from there to here.
What if chappachula equally deplores spending a trillion dollars on an airplane for the same reason? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
Then you’re tilting at windmills. No country on earth has a government that is devoid of white elephants or waste and no country on earth will budget according to exactly your individual priority (unless you become the absolute dictator of a small nation).
Indian rocket scientists aren’t going to immediately switch to digging latrines if the funding is shut off, all you’ll accomplish is a bunch of out of work scientists and further brain drain away from India.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with the OP… we’re not talking about public urination here, which is really not that big of a deal compared to public defecation.
Anyway, I’ve always thought India would be a shitty place to visit.
Dern you to heck, Boyo Jim! I was not ready for that. 
You know, I was just bitching about my job, and then I read about manual scavenging human feces that they pay you for by throwing old food at you and watching you pick it up off the ground. So my job still sucks but it beats the hell out of at least one alternative.
Yes, we really should. It’s a shame that Govt. would rather have an aeroplane than helping people in need. People should always be first.
Perhaps we know the material used to make the tower of Babble now.
Do you blame them, you can’t walk anywhere without stepping it to it.
Those are not standards of hygeine. It is a standard of plumbing. Toilets in India (and most third world countries – evenn Mexico) cannot tolerate huge wasteful wads of paper, and the paper that is available is not of a degradable type that sewage systems can tolerate. If you do not provide a proper receptacle in your bathroom for the paper, they will throw it wherever they can, but definitely not down the toilet. They might also assume that you have a maid of the untouchable caste to pick up the paper scattered around your bathroom. They do not rationally and logically think these things through, they just mindlessly react to a culturally unfamiliar circumstance and muddle through it.
Have you heard about the famous “flying toilets” if Nairobi? People just poop in a plastic bag, and then throw it in a random direction as far as they can.
Something like that comes up on Hoarders from time to time. The plumbing breaks, and they can’t have someone in to fix it because of the hoard, so they turn the water off, and it’s downhill from there. (Eventually it becomes uphill).
Does the term “open defecation” mean that people literally just shit . . . anywhere? I mean, not even dig a little hole in the ground like a cat does? Sorry to be so ignorant, but it just seems counter intuitive that people would willingly live among their own exposed feces. Isn’t there some sort of . . . innate imperative to keep our waste separated from everything else?
Did you ever see the Hoarders episode where the woman was urinating into containers and keeping them? Hundreds of containers filled with human waste piled up in her house. They had to call in a HazMat team.
Nope, there is no such inborn imperative. Keeping waste separate and voiding waste in private are apparently learned traits in human beings.
Well perhaps not.
But ISTM that it IS something that is obvious when someone points out how germs and disease transmission works and having 5 minutes to think about it should solve.
It is ONE thing to shit any old where because, hey, there ain’t no toilets to be found.
It is another thing to have toilets available and not being arsed to use them.
Seriously, if India can’t get their shit together when it comes to making some half assed sewers and convincing people that said thing is better than random places on the ground and in the bushes is better…well, my opinion of India just dropped a few notches.
Maybe Great Britan should have hung around a bit longer.
India has both aspects; see BBC article at link in post #24. It seems old habits die hard.
Wikipedia has a lengthy article about the subject.