PUNE, India — Being pregnant, Nikita Vavale finds herself needing to go to the bathroom a lot these days. But what should be only a slight inconvenience is preventing her from leaving the house because public restrooms are hard to find.

Basic sanitation services are severely lacking in India, where 40 percent of the country's more than 1 billion people practice open defecation, according to 2015 World Bank figures. This can result in the spread of deadly diseases, including cholera, diarrhea and typhoid.

Compounded with dirty drinking water, poor sanitation kills around 842,000 people globally each year, according to the World Health Organization. Poor sanitation alone leads to an estimated 280,000 deaths related to diarrhea, according to the organization.

In India, nearly 400 children under the age of 5 die every day because of poor sanitation, according to UNICEF.

Innovations ranging from restrooms on wheels that also boast Wi-Fi access and cafes, to digital sensors in human waste that seek health trends are being tested here in Pune, a city of 4 million in western India that is serving as a real-world laboratory for sanitation systems of the future.

“What we're trying to do is build up this sense that the sanitation system isn't something that is forgotten on the dirtiest street corners but it's part of a modern, thriving city,” Sandy Rodger, chief operations officer of the Toilet Board Coalition, said in an interview in London.