Flush with success? Secures ODF+epithet but city still needs 16,000+loos

Even though the financial capital still has a few areas where people continue to defecate openly, this week, Mumbai was revalidated as an open-defecation free plus (ODF+) city by the Quality Council of India (QCI), a Union Government affiliated agency. However, activists and citizens have cast doubts on the criteria under which cities are declared ODF.

The QCI officially re-certified Greater Mumbai–an area of 437.7 sq km with over 1.84 crore people–as ODF+. The area includes the old island city, the western and the eastern suburbs of Mumbai, all administered by the BMC.

A QCI team toured the city to conduct a third-party inspection, survey how clean it was and to check if there was open defecation, as part of the Swachh Survekshan, a part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which ranks cities across the country on the basis of their cleanliness quotient. The team selected random spots for surprise inspections, to check if they were opendefecation free (ODF). During their two day-inspection between December 18 and December 20, 2020, the team visited and inspected around 44 random locations across the city and certified all these areas as ODF+.

In its report, the QCI concluded that as on December 20, 2020, Greater Mumbai could be re-certified as ODF+, without open defecation and open urinal spots. "The civic body has worked very hard to make Mumbai litter-free and open-defecation free. As an immediate measure, mobile toilets were set up in slums that do not have adequate toilet facilities. We have repaired many toilets and painted them. Many new toilets have been constructed, while work on many is ongoing," said a BMC official.