Do Cell Phone Subscriptions Really Exceed People with Safe Drinking Water?

Thanks to Robert Adamski for sending this along. It's from Business Insider.

I was curious about the figures for cell phones and people without safe drinking water so I did a little checking.

I was skeptical of the high number of cell phone subscriptions - almost 6 billion, or about 86%of the world's population. I realize that there is some double-counting but I figure it can't be that much. The producer of this chart, Chetan Sharma, says:

By the end of 2011, the global subscriptions exceeded 6 Billion. The first 1 billion took over 20 years and this last one took only 15 months. The primary growth drivers are India and China which are cumulatively adding 75M new subs every quarter. China became the first country to eclipse the 1 billion mark in March 2012. India is likely to arrive at the milestone by early 2013.

In any case, I did a cursory search on Google and most of what I found indicated a number between 5 and 6 billion. Here's an article that said there were 4.6 billion at the end of 2009.

But the drinking water access seems low. The chart indicates about 4.5 billion have access to safe drinking water, leaving 2.5 billon without such access. That figure is about the number of people who do not have access to sanitation as opposed to drinking water, usually pegged at about a billion people. The number WHO recently reported - at the end of 2010, 6.1 billion people, or about 89% of the world's population have access to safe drinking water - equals the figure Sharma reported for cell phone subscriptions.

I could not ascertain the source of Sharma's drinking water figure. Perhaps he confused sanitation and drinking water.

Upshot: as far as I can tell, it's a dead heat. 

But we still have a billion people without safe drinking water and that is far too many.

"At the Olympics in China, every color was represented... and that was just the drinking water. " - Evan Sayet

Comments

[David Zetland]

3.6 billion without access to CLEAN water: http://www.aguanomics.com/2012/04/catch-mice.html

and more on the incentives/economics of mobiles vs water:

http://www.aguanomics.com/2011/06/water-service-and-mobile-phones.html

[Mr X]

It fits with my notion of the situation in Africa and India: higher density of mobile phones than proper water supply and sanitation.
But maybe it is also a matter of counting and definitions: the number of phone connections is rather clear and definable. How is 'safe drinking water' defined? What the locals drink (and appears to be safe for them) makes me sick within five minutes.
In addition, do we have the same notion of urgency as those who we think we are serving? I am not so sure about that. Too often I hear 'the North' discuss options for 'the South', without involvement of 'the South'. Is 'the North' perhaps defining the needs of 'the South'? Do they share the same perception of needs?