ABSTRACT
The UN Millennium Declaration in 2000 has developed a vision for the first 15 years of the new millennium (2000–2015) called Millennium Development Goals for the developing member nations with achieving eight goals in this time frame. Goal seven covers the environmental sustainability issues with one of the targets being to ‘halve by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation' (UN, 2010). In assessing the progress towards that goal, regarding sanitation the United Nations made the following three distinct observations: one, with half the population of developing regions without sanitation, the 2015 target appears to be out of reach; two, disparities in urban and rural sanitation coverage remain daunting; three, improvements in sanitation are bypassing the poor. In those days, the UN Secretary General has said that “even though 1.8 billion have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world remains off track for the sanitation target” (Hossain and Howard, 2014). All these non-achievements were well and truly relevant to the India, Bangladesh, and Cambodian context in Asia. The present chapter, thus, tries to investigate how these three countries progressed further with MDG goal seven to 2015 and beyond.
