27.5% increase for Swachh Bharat
NEWDELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet cleanliness scheme, Swachh Bharat Mission, has been given a 27.5% hike in funds as the government wants to shift from building toilets to better waste management.
The Swachh Bharat Mission was allotted ₹9,638 crore in the revised estimate in FY2019-20. Presenting India’s first general budget in the new decade, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allotted ₹12,294 crore for the programme, a hike of 27.5%. In the FY19-20, the government had allotted ₹12,644 crore but a large mount remained unspent.
Sitharaman underlined that the NDA government will continue to push for the next phase after meeting its initial target of making India open defecation free (ODF).
The government’s claims however, has been countered by a team of demographers led by Dianne Coffey, a visiting researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute. The team found that at least 43% of rural people in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, accounting for two-fifths of India’s rural population, still defecated in the open in 2018 because of “cultural and other reasons”. The government however, had junked this claim. The ODF Plus will focus on better waste management to ensure higher levels of cleanliness.
“Our government is committed to ODF Plus in order to sustain ODF behaviour and to ensure that no one is left behind. Now, more needs to be done towards liquid and grey water management. Focus would also be on solid waste collection, source segregation and processing,” she said in her budget speech on Saturday, while announcing that the “total allocation for Swachh Bharat Mission is about ₹12,300 crore in 2020-21”.
The scheme, which was rolled out from October 2 in 2014, has so far built 10.2 crore toilets across the states, according to the official data.
Achirangshu Acharya, economist with Viswa Bharati, said that “the Swachh Bharat Mission has been a very successful scheme of the Modi government. But the new phase requires a larger involvement of the administration ...greater resource mobilization is required for this second phase.”