A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran a front-page story on the widespread prevalence of open defecation and malnutrition in India. This bit caught a lot of attention:
Open defecation has long been an issue in India. Some ancient Hindu texts advised people to relieve themselves far from home, a practice that Gandhi sought to curb.
You can read rebuttals here and here.
This is the author himself defending the story on twitter.
Finally, "Hindu-phobia" allegations here and here. (I have a feeling we'll see much more of these in the future)
I suppose it is too much to ask people to focus on the fact that:
A child raised in India is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the planet’s poorest countries. Stunting affects 65 million Indian children under the age of 5, including a third of children from the country’s richest families...
Half of India’s population, or at least 620 million people, defecate outdoors. And while this share has declined slightly in the past decade, an analysis of census data shows that rapid population growth has meant that most Indians are being exposed to more human waste than ever before.
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