In many parts of India, people are more likely to have access to a cellphone than to a toilet

The Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar has no clean water for its shacks made of ripped tarp and bamboo. No garbage pickup. No power except from haphazard cables strung overhead illegally. And not a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 people. Yet nearly every destitute family in the slum has a cellphone. Some have three. India is a country buoyed by a vibrant business world of call centers and software developers, but hamstrung by a bloated, corrupt government that has failed to deliver the barest of services. Its estimated growth rate of 8.5% a year is among the highest in the world, but its roads are crumbling. It offers cheap, world-class medical care to Western tourists at private hospitals, yet has some of the worst child-mortality and maternal death rates outside sub-Saharan Africa. While tens of millions have benefited from India's rise, many more remain mired in some of the worst poverty in the world. In fact, up to 800 million Indians live on less than $2 a day while only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine. In Annabhau Sathe Nagar, a raised latrine of corrugated tin empties into a river of sewage that children splash in and adults wade across. The slum in east Mumbai has about 50,000 residents and a single toilet building, with 10 pay toilets for men and eight for women, two of which are broken.