A broom with a view
By making ‘Swachch Bharat’ one of his priorities, PM Narendra Modi has catapulted the big problem areas of lack of toilets and open defecation to the forefront of India’s policy-making
NEW DELHI: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes up the broom on Gandhi Jayanti, he will drive forward the “Swachch Bharat” campaign and go for a goal that has eluded successive governments.
Modi making cleaning India one of his priorities has accordingly catapulted the big problem areas of lack of toilets and open defecation to the forefront of policy making in India.
Additionally, it has also underlined the failure of country’s sanitation programmes.
Nearly three decades after the first efforts were made in this direction, when the government launched central rural sanitation programme in 1986, and 15 years after a more focused campaign to build toilets was made in the form of Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 1999, the results have been abysmal.
According to Census 2011, 67% of the rural households and 13% of the urban households defecate in the open. A global comparison is not too flattering either. India accounts for 60% of those who practice open defecation.
According to a survey by non-governmental organisation Research Institute of Compassionate Economics, 40% of households that have a working latrine have at least one person who regularly defecates in the open.
Again less than half of people who have a government latrine use it regularly and half of people who defecate in the open say that they do so because it is comfortable and convenient.
“New policies must focus on creating demand for toilet and latrine use rather than building toilets that few people, other than the contractors who are paid to build them, actually want,” the report published in June said.
The problems with the flag- ship TSC, which doles out ` 10,500 per household for building toilets, was flagged by the World Bank in 2010 when it questioned the sustainability of the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP), a cash incentive (`50,000 to ` 50 lakh) under the campaign to encourage villages go ‘open defecation free’ (ODF).
“Studies on NGP sustainability showed that only 73% have access to toilets in NGP villages, while usage of household toilets is low at 67%,” said the report.
The report underlined that while villages do achieve the ODF status, lured by the cash incentive, they fail to sustain it because the toilets states subsidise lie unused with people going back to defecating in the open.