Although a nation’s development is calculated from the sum total of annual production and service i.e. GDP, or monetary ration per capita this mean average does not always reflect a population’s living standard level accurately as would other statistical data indicate.
Recently on BBC, an expert from Singapore proposed to measure the level of nation’s development and living standards by general sanitary conditions e.g. the number of bathrooms with flushing toilets per 100 families. Most basic requirement for a healthy living is access to drinking water followed by water for sanitation. When Singaporean residents first moved to inexpensive apartments with flushing water closets, he says, citizens felt their living standards “brought to a whole new level and felt like the British.” Working presently as a volunteer in a small residential district in Malaysia, he showed the journalist around poor income family neighbourhoods, more specifically their restrooms, explaining that the number of absences of female pupils decreased significantly in village schools that have flushing water closets.
What if we measured Ulaanbaatar’s living standards in this way?
About 270,000 families, more than half of the city’s population live in ger districts. 45 flush toilet bathrooms per 100 families in Ulaanbaatar is a long ways from meeting healthy sanitation demands. According to the resident representative of UNICEF ”the cold winter is Ulaanbaatar’s residents’ saving force from infectious plague,” and social pressure to bathe daily is lacking in Mongolia.
Although Greek goddess of health, sanitation and cleanliness, Hygieia (from which derive the English “hygiene” and Russian “гигиена”) would have at first ran away from embarrassment if she saw us Mongolians who do not bathe, she would by her godly nature bestow on our mentality the culture of daily cleanliness if we would permit her.
At least Hygieia would impose on district and aimag government and civic representatives to make sure running hot water was available to residents before constructing palaces, building memorials for themselves.
Let’s consider for example the Bayanzurkh District with 280,000 residents, most of whom live in gers. Research showed no results as to how many public bath facilities there are in the district and how many families share one. On the other hand, it is known that the district government palace was built for 3,8 billion Tugrogs and that the 28-meter high monument for the so-called “District plateau” is being constructed on the Chuluun-Ovoo merging circle of three roads. The marble lion placed on top of this statue with two dogs at its feet stands majestically as if to prove the saying “lion has worshippers, dog has demons.” This so-called “investment” in commemoration of the district government cost the city 300 million Tugrogs and additional 450 million from the District. Instead of resonating with the great Column of Victory in the well-planned city of Berlin, Ulaanbaatar’s symbol of megalomania looks like another visual obstacle for our drivers only to guarantee the increase in number of car accidents. It would be a different matter if our roads were as clear and wide as in Berlin. Now we will hope that one day it will be so.
This action is an example of Mongolian public governance. If the 750 million Tugrogs were directed toward building hot water facilities for all the district residents instead, the form would have more realistically suited the purpose.
Now if our dear readers would put their brother or Aimag in place of Bayanzurkh district they would get a similar picture. The reason behind such similarity is that Mongolian governance is making the same decisions on every level. It is true that when there is no leadership at the top it will not exist at lower levels either.
Translated by J.Ariunaa
Unoodor Newspaper
2011.08.17