Swachh Bharat 2.0 will tackle plastic menace on war footing
NEWDELHI: The Modi government will reposition its flagship sanitation programme, Swachh Bharat, to tackle the menace of plastic waste, according to a strategy document reviewed by Hindustan Times that will steer the next phase of the mission expected to run until 2029.
The key objective of the Swachh Bharat Mission so far has been to achieve an open-defecation free (ODF) country by October 2, 2019, with a toilet for every household.
Apart from its focus on sanitation, the Swachh Bharat mission will now be geared towards recycling and managing waste, including so-called single-use plastic. The government will deploy the same set of strategies adopted for the ODF drive, an official familiar with the plan said on condition of anonymity. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 15 called for ending the use of single-use plastic in three years. For now, the government has decided against a blanket ban on single-use plastic items. Rather, under Swachh Bharat, every village panchayat and local bodies will have access to solid and liquid waste management facilities, just like toilets.
The government relied on a high-octane public campaign, aimed at behavioural change, and hired ground-level “motivators” as a way of targeting open defecation. A similar ground-up approach to recycle and segregate waste, such as organic matter and used plastics, will be part of Swachh Bharat’s renewed goals. Indore, declared India’s cleanest city under Swachh Bharat rankings, will serve as a model for urban waste management, while Tamil Nadu’s villagelevel waste recycling model could be replicated elsewhere for rural India. The strategy has been prepared by the department of sanitation under the Jal Shakti ministry, which oversees the Swachh Bharat Mission, after consulting state governments and various stakeholders. On Wednesday, addressing a landmark event in Ahmedabad, Modi said that rural India has declared itself open-defecation free, fulfilling the core objective of Swachh Bharat mission he launched on October 2, 2014. According to data from the World Bank, in 2015, 44% of Indians defecated in the open, a majority of them in the countryside. The new Swachh Bharat strategy lays down a framework to guide “local governments, policy makers, implementers and other relevant stakeholders” in implementing what is now being called ODF Plus. It also focuses on, apart from sanitation, the management of three categories of waste: plastic waste, organic, grey water management and black water waste. Organic waste refers to any bio-origin leftover matter, while black-water waste, in the context of sanitation, refers to faecal sludge.